


Come Into the Water

by lesbianettes



Category: Chicago Med, Law & Order: SVU
Genre: AU, Angst, F/F, Fluff, Hanukkah, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Past Rape, Love, Mental Illness, Multi Chapter, implied depression, mermaid!Ava, rabbi!Olivia, semi graphic self harm, teacher!maggie, the found family strikes again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2020-11-28 09:55:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 26,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20964602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Sarah, after a mental break, gets a fresh start in a small northwestern town with a lot of secrets.Updates Wednesdays





	1. Chapter 1

The first box is the easiest.

Sarah sets it down in the middle of the floor and subsequently spends a few long minutes just staring out the slider as waves crash against the shore not too far away. Far enough that the high tide won’t attack her, but close enough for nothing to obstruct her view of the rolling blue under a sky of marine layer thick like the fog over her head. Bringing the box in was easy, putting it down is easy, but she’s suddenly confronted with the fact that she is not on a vacation, as eager as her mother had been to paint it that way. She gets it, in a way. Everyone would like to believe this is just a vacation, herself included. That’s what her old therapist had said, anyways. They’re still going to call every couple weeks, but she’s supposed to be seeing someone new in town twice a week.

All the boxes in the middle are a little harder, but the hardest is the last box because it forces her to confront the fact that everything she owns fits into only six cardboard moving boxes. One of pillows and blankets. One of towels. Two of clothes. One of plates, bowls, cups and silverware. And one of books and trinkets. Six boxes contain her whole life, or at least what she’s managed to salvage of herself. Sarah just looks at the last box, not bringing it in, while the movers supply her with freshly bought furniture courtesy of her mother. A couch, a dining room table, a few chairs, a bedframe and mattress, and a dresser are put in their places. Then the movers bid her a stiff goodbye and drive off, leaving her to numbly look at the box on the front porch in front of her.

In theory, it’s easy. Pick up the box. Carry it inside. Put it next to the others. It’s a little heavy, but nothing she can’t handle, in all honesty. She’d managed to build some muscle a few months ago, and while it’s begun to wither away, she’s still more than capable of carrying in the box. All she has to do is pick it up. Pick it up. Pick it up. Her hands are in her hair, pulling but not hard, yet. Eyes shut. The weight of her body is too heavy on her feet. Sinking into the concrete porch. Pick up the box. She just has to pick up the box. But instead, she thinks she might be crying. Wasn’t this supposed to be over?

The next thing she knows, she’s sitting on top of the box, pulling absentmindedly at the bandages on her forearm. However, absentmindedly has an implication of something peaceful. Habitual and familiar, absentmindedness is pleasant the way so many talk about it. A forgetful college professor rushing into class, a mother spreading peanut butter on her phone, a kid scuffing his shoe on the pavement. This is a different absentminded, the way her fingers dig into the edge of the white gauze and pull at it with fervor. But it’s still absent, still unintentional and without the awareness with which she has taken to approaching a great amount of her life lately.

She finds herself watching the sun fall into the horizon over the waves, and scours her mind for when she got here. It was morning, she thinks. The sun was low in the sky, the fog still drooling onto the land from the restless waves. Now the day has escaped her, and she’s torn open the first layer of bandages on her arm. For this very reason, there are three or four layers of spirals before her skin.

“Sorry to interrupt, but you’ve been sitting there all day.”

Several things happen in the span of one second; Sarah’s heart skips a beat, her hand tenses on the bandages and rips another layer, her feet skid on the pavement in her effort to get up, and she bursts into frustrated tears. It’s too fast, or perhaps simply feels that way to her because the world has gone too fast lately. Breathing is a chore, the only one she seems capable of handling today, and for a few labored breaths, she stares at the stranger in front of her, a kind woman with rich brown skin, downturned eyes, and a low ponytail. She’s the sort of woman Sarah would like to trust.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the woman says. She extends a hand tentatively, the way one holds a hand to a dog to sniff before they try to pet it. “I’m Maggie, I live next door.”

“Sarah.”

With a deep breath, Sarah forces herself to shake Maggie’s hand. Her voice is as sweet as the caring expression on her face, one of a woman who has spent a lifetime looking after others. A nurse, or a daycare worker, or someone like that. Someone good. It would be so nice to know someone good instead of cutthroat, but the fear is there. She’s sizing Maggie up, she realizes. Trying to decide if she’d be able to overpower Sarah if she really wanted to. It’s a bad habit she’s supposed to be getting out of.

“Let me carry that in for you, and if you want, I’ve got leftovers in my fridge. We can eat together, or you can just take them. You could use them.”

Maggie picks up Sarah’s box, carries it inside, and sets it with the others. Heat sears into Sarah’s cheeks because she knows how it looks. Six measly boxes. Each labeled in neat handwriting, revealing how little of herself remains. She had been more, she thinks, at some point. But a lot of her died in an office packed with books and journals and photos of a daughter who had made it into the world. She is empty now. Her thumb digs into the center of her bandages. It doesn’t hurt, but she’d like it to.

“About dinner-”

“Thank you, but I really- I can’t. Maybe another time?”

“Another time,” Maggie agrees. Her eyes trace Sarah’s face too closely. She wants to die on the spot just so Maggie will stop looking. “If you ever need anything, I’m just to the left, so don’t hesitate to come over. And if I’m not home, my wife probably is.”

“Okay.” 

With that, Maggie lets herself out and shuts the door gently, once again leaving Sarah alone surrounded by her miniscule life and furniture she didn’t pick out. She looks around the space and finds herself drawn to the slider again. Darkness edges in above the horizon, and she scrambles forward to close the cheap plastic blinds. They’re not perfect, but they block the window so no one can see in. She gets the kitchen window too and finds the switch for the light in the dining room, one of the only ones the house came with. It allows her the light she needs to tear open the towel box and grab one, a soft bath towel in a forgiving dark red. As of yet, she hasn’t gotten any soap or shampoo, a tooth brush, anything. But she goes to the bathroom anyways and spends a good five minutes figuring out how to turn on the shower and get the hot water she craves going. The crumpled towel earns a home on the toilet seat as she all but tears off her clothing. No laundry hamper yet, either. That’s fine. 

The hardest part of this is taking off her bandages to prevent them from being soaked and contracting an infestation of mildew or worse. She doesn’t want to look as she unwinds the cause and peels up the cotton pads, which join her clothes on the floor in a mess Sarah just doesn’t have the energy to deal with right now. 

Somehow, she’s staring at it. Most of her arm is healed, a splatter of dark pink skin that has scarred, but there’s plenty only beginning to scab from her most recent attack, if that’s what one were to call it. She doesn’t mean to, but when she’s anxious, caught in her head, upset, existing- she finds her right fingernails digging into the tender skin of her left inner forearm. Cutting her fingernails short, wrapping herself in bandages to protect her arm and its scabs, they’re supposed to help. 

She looks at the scabs for a long time before dragging herself into the water and letting it wash over her like it’s washing away her pain. The coating of school and stale white walls melt off of her, spiral down the drain, mesh together to remind her exactly what forced her into this otherwise quaint little cottage. It would be a nice home, had she picked it herself and come voluntarily. Perhaps she’d put art or photos on the walls, which would be painted a warmer color than the current murky dark green-grey-blue. 

When the water soaks through her curls to drizzle over her scalp, she comes back to herself. As much as she can nowadays, anyways. There’s a thin layer of plastic sheeting between her mind and body, and no matter how hard she tries to break it, it stands impenetrable. Sarah wonders if it’s for the best. It protects her, at any rate. She’s better off on this side of the barrier, she tells herself, and turns off the water. Going out, she isn’t any cleaner; she didn’t wash her body or her hair- which isn’t even totally wet yet. 

Sarah wraps the towel around her, more as a blanket than anything to actually dry herself off. It’s soft, comforting around her. She checks, as she drags her exhausted body into the main area, that all the windows are covered so that anyone walking by can’t see her. So  _ he  _ can’t see her. Sometimes, invisibility feels like the safest thing in the world and she needs more of it than she could ever have.

She lays down on the floor, surrounded by her boxes, although she knows come morning she’ll regret it. It’s only fitting. Regret is the main emotion she deals with nowadays, when she manages to feel anything at all. Her eyes lock onto a little crack where the wall meets the trimming, thin and probably in danger of mold when she’s this close to the ocean. Her mother had said something about keeping the house aired out, but Sarah hasn’t listened to her in quite some time.

By the time she falls asleep, orange has begun to disrupt the sky outside.


	2. Chapter 2

When Sarah wakes up, her whole body aches, just as she expected, and the light coming through the cracks in the blinds tells her that it must be mid-morning. The light is still coming in through the eastern kitchen window stronger than that of the slider on the west, and has a tilted slant to the way it fades into her tiles. She should really unpack her few belongings, she thinks, but instead lays on the floor for a while longer, simply watching the dust drift in the sunbeams. 

Once she finally gets to her feet, she decides to go see the neighbor, Maggie. She’s supposed to be making friends and not isolating, after all, and if she hasn’t talked to anyone by her appointment tomorrow, her therapist will be mad at her. Not really, but it’ll feel like she’s mad at her, and Sarah hates that. She stumbles on creaky muscles and pincushion legs to the bathroom to pick up yesterday’s clothes instead of trying to unpack anything new. That’s too much for her right now. Sarah pulls on the sweatpants and tank top, kicks at her dirty bandage with a distasteful expression. She should get a trash can at some point, probably. And a toothbrush. She runs her tongue along her teeth and winces, knowing her breath can’t be great. But if she goes to the store, she won’t have the energy to visit the neighbors, and visiting them is probably what her therapist wants her to do. So she should probably avoid breathing too closely to any of them, she thinks as she searches for her shoes and shoves her feet into them. Broken glass is a bitch, and even if she hasn’t seen it here like she did in Chicago, she doesn’t want to take the chance.

Just like Maggie said, she goes to the house on the left. Unlike her own, with a pale blue exterior in need of a power washing, Maggie’s house is a soft cotton candy pink with white trimming and a quaintly sloped roof. All the windows are open, filling the air with the scent of fresh cut fruit and maple syrup, helped along on the sound of off-key singing in nonsense baby talk. It doesn’t sound like Maggie, so it must be her wife. Sarah likes the sound of that phrase- her wife. She could get used to a pair of words like that. Paint them across her bedroom wall and stitch it onto embroidered pillows. It would be a good excuse to learn embroidery.

She almost doesn’t knock on the front door. Her hand moves without permission, though, drawn into the feeling of home that clouds the front step and the little herb garden beneath one of the windows and the toys clumped in one corner of the yard. The wood is solid, real beneath her fist when she knocks. 

“One minute!”

The singing stops, and in the time between knocking and the door opening, Sarah thinks long and hard about just going back home. It’d be easier, for one thing. But she should do this, no matter how hard. Right as the doorknob twists, she slaps her hand over her forearm protectively. She should’ve put on a jacket, or a long sleeved shirt.

Maggie’s wife already has a smile on her face when she opens the door, dressed comfortably in pajama pants and a loose tee shirt, a towel thrown over her shoulder, and caramel hair tied out of her face. She’s pretty the way millenium old forests are pretty. There are kind lines by her eyes, freckles where her skin is bare, and a golden eight-pointed star resting between her collarbones. She looks happy. She looks like what Sarah wants to be.

“You must be Sarah! Maggie told me you might come by,” she says, and steps out of the doorway to gesture inwards. “I’m Olivia, and this-” she points at a high chair containing a strawberry-stained toddler as Sarah comes in, “-is our son Noah.”

“Hi, Noah.”

Olivia walks back to the kitchen, in the same place as Sarah’s but much more homely, with a fruit basket on the breakfast bar, food in the middle of being prepared, and a few scribbled drawings pinned to the fridge by brightly colored magnets. Her sock-covered feet slide a little but she doesn’t slip.

“Sit down, I’ll get you a plate.”

“I don’t need-”

One of Olivia’s hands wave dismissively and she grabs two pancakes from a stack next to the fruit, depositing them on a little blue plate and setting it in front of Sarah, followed by a fork and a container of maple syrup. Noah decides at that moment to make an unhappy sound, kick his feet, and point at Sarah’s pancakes.

“You already had yours, sweet boy. Coffee?”

“That sounds nice, thank you.”

“Cream or sugar?”

“No thanks.”

A steaming mug, chipped along the rim, settles in front of Sarah in the blink of an eye. She lets herself just smell it, clear her of everything else for a moment before she thinks about eating the admittedly fluffy pancakes in front of her. Everything smells good in here. The air is warmer. There’s chaos, but it’s a good kind of chaos that she wishes she could cultivate for herself someday. As she watches and stabs at her breakfast half-heartedly, Olivia finishes cutting fruit and dumps some onto Noah’s highchair tray, some into a tupperware container, and some into a bowl which she leaves within Sarah’s reach in a silent but much appreciated gesture. 

Then she takes a seat herself and uses her fork to tear into a pancake. “You just moved in yesterday?”

“Yeah, from uh, from Chicago.”

It’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth, either.

“Mmm. Long way to come but I get it. It’s peaceful here,” Olivia muses. She has a little smile on her face. “Mag’s from Chicago, I’m from New York. She came for a conference I spoke at, and we hit it off. The rest is history.”

“Nnnn,” Noah adds, pointing at Sarah’s food again and making a whiny sound.

Sarah gives him a small piece to placate him, and when he smiles, she can’t help smiling back. He’s a happy looking kid. She doesn’t remember if she was, and no one has ever told her. 

“If you need help unpacking or getting essentials, need to find anything in town, or just want a friend, we’ve got you. At least one of us is usually home, and I can give you our numbers, if you want them. I know how lonely a new place can feel.”

“Thanks, I… I really appreciate that.”

Olivia just smiles at her, and a moment later, stands upright in a bit of a rush like she’s forgotten something. She dashes from the room, leaving Sarah alone with Noah, who holds a hand out for another piece of pancake she can’t resist giving him. She probably shouldn’t feed someone else’s baby, but it makes him happy. Children- babies- are so simple. Little things bring them so much joy. They don’t know what anything except happiness feels like.

The loud thunk of books on the counter stirs Sarah from her thoughts and gets her focus on the three thick spines in front of her. One is an encyclopedia of some sort, one is on the types of fish off the Northern California coast, and the third just has little shells hot glued to the spine instead of a title.

“I think you’d like these.” Olivia traces her fingers over the cover of the top book. “Just for looking at, if you want. You can take them home with you, or leave them here and come see whenever you want- I wouldn’t mind the company. It’s a good way to get acquainted with the area.”

Sarah takes the encyclopedia- old with yellowing pages, a white crease in the spine and smudges to the lettering of the front cover, clearly loved- and realizes it’s about urban legends. A bright pink sticky note emerges from the center, new and unworn. It must’ve been placed there recently. 

“That’s the part that I think is most relevant for this town is marked. The fish book is just- it’s just a good look through. And the album is uh, it’s sentimental. So be gentle with it.”

“I will. I promise.”

The smile Olivia gives her is blinding. Pure joy, excitement. It’s not like the way he smiled at Sarah before his hand cupped the back of her neck, but rather that of someone who has nothing but love to give. For the first time in a while, Sarah is almost excited. She wants to look at these books. She wants to connect. 

“You’re welcome to hang around a bit if you want. I’ll just be hanging around the house for a bit, but I’ve got a study at four- Maggie should be home by then. We’re gonna eat at around eight, if you wanna join us.”

“Thanks but I think-” she thinks it’s too much in one day. Too much energy she doesn’t have. “I think I better head home for a bit. I’ll see you later?”

“Of course.”

Olivia hugs her briefly but tightly, and wishes her a good day as Sarah carries the three books back home and sets them on the floor next to her towel. The couch is uncomfortable. Wrong. Not hers. She opens the encyclopedia first, turning to the marked section, and just stares at it for a good ten minutes. There’s a lot of text, small and dense and too much for her to process, but the picture included is mesmerizing. It’s of a woman with dark grey skin and long black hair, her lips pouting and eyes slitted like a cat’s. But it’s not a woman. It’s a mermaid, her torso melting into scales that look to have been hand painted into the book but obviously haven’t been. 

“Mermaids,” she tells the book.

The book says nothing back.

She doesn’t have it in her to read and sets aside the encyclopedia, skips over the fish book, and opens the album. In glittery capital letters, it reads “AVA” on the first page above a picture of a much younger Olivia sitting in the shallows of the ocean with a blonde little girl, smiling with gap teeth at something just above the camera. Maggie probably took the photo. Sarah slips her fingers beneath the page and turns it to reveal more photos, tucked into the stiff plastic sleeves. They’re all of the same little girl, but it becomes quickly apparent that she isn’t a little girl. Where she should have legs, her waist lengthens and trails into bright blue and gold scales. Most of the photos are similar; the girl- Ava, if Sarah had to guess- frolics in the waves, often with Olivia and/or Maggie. There’s an image of her presenting cupped hands full of pearls to the camera with an innocent smile. As the photos go on, she gets older. The photos seem to have more time between them.

Three quarters of the way through the album, there are no more photos, and the last one is dated two years ago. Ava looks to be in her early twenties, smiling and holding little black picture- an ultrasound. Sarah reads the caption on the back of the photo. 

"Baby brother on the way!"

After that, nothing. 

Sarah finds herself looking at the picture a bit longer, studying Ava's face. She's really pretty, with a stunning, genuine smile and wavy blonde hair and bright blue eyes like the ocean. Her tan skin is dotted with moles, but instead of studying it, she slams the album shut. She's not supposed to look at women like that, naked women like that.

But then two words come back to her like a gift from God. Her wife. Maybe it's something she's allowed to have. Maybe. Sarah isn't ready to think about it either way and crawls over to the couch. It'll be more comfortable than the floor, she thinks, as she imagines what it might be like to meet Ava. Does she smile as much in real life? Is she more solemn? What does her laugh sound like? The photos stick to her memory even though she shouldn't think about them. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally meet Ava!

After setting the photo album aside, Sarah decides to head down to the shore. It’s not very crowded, the midday sun hidden behind a layer of puffy grey clouds, and the waves look strong but not overwhelming. She rolls up her pants to her calves and walks out the slider, hopping over the railing of the porch and finding herself with her toes in the sand and the ocean air on her face in a different way than it feels when she leaves through the front door. If she squints, she can make out dolphins in the distance, leaping in and out of the water playfully. They have their pods. Social creatures, smart, friendly. Together. A smile tugs at Sarah’s face as she walks through the sand.

She steps only a couple feet into the surf, letting waves lap at her ankles as she wonders toward a cove of little tidepools and caves dipping into where the beach has curved up into a mild cliffside. Something about them calls to her. All of them have little microcosms living inside, rippling in the wind and with the occasionally washes of new waves rolling over where the rocks have divided things up. She goes to one of the biggest, with anemones and starfish and a scuttling crab. Colorful, alive, beautiful, so alluring that she can’t help sitting on the wet rocks and reaching a hand into the cold water. A handful of little fish skitter away, although she’s free to skate her finger across the top of an anemone to feel it stick to the pad for a moment before she pulls away.

Sarah does it again because it feels interesting and she needs sensations that don’t hurt, she thinks. She’s earned it. Then her fingertips trace over the top of a little red starfish, and it’s then that she hears a heavy splash to her right. Immediately she jerks her hand out of the pool and looks around for the source. There seems to be no one else around, or any animal big enough to make a sound like that, but she’s unsettled.

“Hello?”

A humming trill answers back and Sarah stands up, instantly wrinkling her nose over how wet and clingy her clothes are. She hates when they cling tightly, stick to her skin and often go see-through to reveal more than she’s ever prepared to show. Although she can’t be certain, she thinks the sound came from near the caves and makes her way over carefully, almost falling a couple times and managing to sustain a long scrape on her right bicep.

“Is anyone here?”

“Here,” an accented voice calls, a little husky and strained. Sarah scans the area and sees no one, close to giving up when the voice calls to her again. “Look down.”

She does as told and sees the most beautiful woman she’s ever laid eyes on, her wet hair framing her face and lips pouty, splashing a little pathetically in the shallows. But she knows that face. This is Ava. When Sarah studies closer, she can make out Ava’s body and tail, surrounded with a silver web like starlight.

“Holy shit.”

“Can you help me?” Ava asks. The water ripples around her again. “I’m stuck.”

“Yeah.”

Sarah wades over, hating the slimy feel of mossy rocks beneath her feet, but approaching Ava nonetheless. She feels the moment she gets too close, because the tip of Ava’s tail brushes her shins and Sarah flinches so badly she nearly falls yet again. She keeps her eyes down, then, so she doesn’t find herself looking at the human part of Ava’s body.

“Do you just need help getting back out to the water, or…?”

Ava lifts her tail and arches more of her chest out of the water, revealing netting tangled around her body and what appears to be a hook in her side. Poor thing. Sarah should help her. She can’t leave her here, and Ava asked for her help specifically, so she’s got to figure this out and help her. She starts at the tip of Ava’s tail.

Most people would be freaking out about this, she thinks. A real life mermaid is here, and she’s beautiful, and she’s friendly. She’s trapped, too, which is a danger if someone else had found her and taken advantage of the fact that she can’t get anywhere. Thankfully the wire isn’t too thin, so it doesn’t cut into her palms when she starts to pull at it. This would be faster if she could cut through it, but she doesn’t have a knife with her. So she tries to be gentle, easing the knots free so the net will unfold flat again. She doesn’t know how fragile or sensitive Ava’s tail is, but she can hear her breathing harshly, see the water moving with ribcage.

“You’re okay,” Sarah says. “I’ll get you out of this. My name is Sarah.”

“Ava.”

She nods like she didn’t already know and manages to get Ava’s tail freed fairly quickly because the tangles aren’t too bad. But her chest is a whole different story. It’s tightly wound around her, including her arms and her breasts, and there’s the fish hook in her side to deal with as well.

Sarah can’t look. Well, she can look at the fish hook. She was training to be a doctor before this. But everything else, it makes bile rise in her throat, makes her feel dirty and disgusting. Like he made her feel. She can’t look at Ava’s bare chest because it’s wrong and she knows better. Her hands flutter uselessly above Ava, not sure where to go to avoid touching something she shouldn’t. She knows what those touches feel like.

“Please, just help me get out.”

The desperate tone to Ava’s voice takes precedence, and she forces herself to take a deep breath and get to work, still pointedly keeping her eyes on safe areas like Ava’s shoulders. Not her waist. Not her… nothing like that. She can’t. But she starts untangling carefully, wary of unwanted contact or touching the fish hook. As she loosens the grip the net has, Ava’s breathing calms down and she stops twitching restlessly in the water.

“Almost done,” Sarah soothes.

She reaches the last of it and pulls the net away, then casts it onto the rocks instead of the ocean so it won’t tangle around another hapless victim, perhaps one who can’t call for help like Ava did. 

“Thank you,” Ava says, smiling brightly and stretching before remembering the fish hook in her side, quickly curling back up with a wince. “Shit.”

“I’ll take care of that.” 

Sarah places one hand flat on Ava’s stomach- and doesn’t notice how warm and soft her skin is, where it hasn’t been burned by the rope friction- and the other on the hook. She should be doing this somewhere sterile, have stitches and bandages at the ready, but she can’t just bring a mermaid to a hospital. So she carefully eases it out, apologizing every time Ava winces or tenses in response. Blood drools from the wound, but not too much, thankfully. If she’s lucky, maybe it’ll heal on its own.

Another beautiful smile, more at ease this time, stretches across Ava’s face, and then she’s cupping Sarah’s face and pulling her in for a salt-water kiss. It’s too much, but she doesn’t have time to pull away before it’s over and she’s a little dizzy. It wasn’t a bad kiss. It felt nice, but now her throat is closing up and she’s only thinking about the way he felt when he kissed her. He had grabbed her neck, not her face. His hands were bigger, colder.

“I have to- I have to go.”

She stumbles to her feet and leaves Ava behind, still bleeding a little and no doubt confused, but at the very least she’s now safe. Sarah doesn’t have to add that to her list of anxieties as she hurries back home where it’s safe. Where she’s safe. The door opens easily because she didn’t lock it. She doesn’t know where the key even is, actually. And now she’s in the living room surrounded by the moving boxes and it just feels like she’s surrounded by a past she doesn’t know how to control or overcome.

Her clothes are soaked with salt water, and her scrapes are starting to hurt. She doesn’t know what to do next, short of opening one of the boxes of clean clothes, which she doesn’t want to do. It feels like a lot, and she’s had a long day already. She went to see Olivia (and Noah) and met Ava, and if she’s honest, that’s more social interaction in a single day than she dealt with in a whole week before she came here. No wonder she’s tired.

She looks to the three books sitting on her floor, and goes over to one of the clothes boxes. All she has to do is open it and get something clean to wear. It’s not hard. Three steps: one, open the box; two, get out something to change into; three, put it on. She shouldn’t be struggling this much with it, especially when she’s supposed to be getting better. For all that it’s worth, she has her exhaustion to show for the progress she’s made. This is the easiest thing she’s done all day. And if she’s going to eat today, it would have to be at dinner like Olivia invited her to, which means she absolutely needs clean clothes. And if she doesn’t go to that, she has her first appointment with her new therapist in the morning, anyways.

Sarah digs her nails into the cellophane packing tape, which absolutely fails to break it open. That’s the sharpest thing she has. Fuck. She feels her eyes start to burn with tears and she hates it so much. If only she could go back in time, keep her life from spiraling so completely out of control like this. 

Just then, someone knocks on her door and she almost screams in frustration. Instead, she stares at the box a little more until a voice cuts through the wood. 

“Hey, we brought you some dinner, thought you might be hungry.”

At Liv’s voice, she knows she has to open it. Olivia and Maggie have been kind to her, and she doesn’t want to burn that bridge. Sarah drags herself to the door to open it, revealing Olivia holding a few containers of takeout and Maggie with Noah balanced on her hip. 

“We got a little of everything,” Maggie says. “Take your pick.”

She doesn’t want to, but Sarah’s been taught to be a good host. Her chest tightens, but she steps back into the house and opens the door wider. “Come on in.”

Throughout dinner, Sarah is quiet because it’s easy. Maggie talks about her students while she feeds Noah bites of dinner between her own. Olivia mostly stares wistfully out the window, quieter than earlier in the day, but pleasant to be around nonetheless. What little energy Sarah has left depletes itself. By the time they leave, she can barely keep her eyes open, but hauls herself back to her box of clothes and painstakingly peels up the tape until the flaps open and she’s face to face with tightly packed, soft clothes that she didn’t throw away with the others and don’t irritate her skin or bring up bad memories. She pulls out a tee shirt and boxers, but doesn’t bother digging deeper for more clothes.

She doesn’t have it in her to even rinse off, only to change into dry clothes and collapse on her couch with cushions that aren’t even soft or comfortable. Her mattress might be better, but it’s farther away, and she doesn’t want to go to it. Instead she settles with her head on the arm rest and remembers Ava. The rope around her, the hook in her side, the pain inflicted upon her by a careless fisherman who thought himself above caring for the safety of sea life. 

Ava’s more beautiful in person than in the pictures, even hurt, and she had been so gentle when she pulled Sarah in for a kiss. She’s sweet. In that moment, she was the mermaid in the photo album, but otherwise, Sarah has to wonder why she suddenly disappeared from the photos. Something could have happened, like it did to her at school, but somehow she doesn’t believe Maggie or Olivia would ever hurt someone. 

The thoughts wrestle with her consciousness until fitful sleep drags her down.


	4. Chapter 4

In the morning, Sarah wakes up staring at the little analog clock sitting on the floor in the corner. She doesn’t remember putting it there, but it’s helpful as it tells her she needs to get going to her appointment soon. The appointment she definitely doesn’t want to go to. The appointment she has to go to if she doesn’t want anyone banging down her door to drag her, kicking and screaming, back to sterile walls where they call her a danger to herself even though it’s hardly true.

She forces herself to sit up and find a pair of pants, which turn out to be a loose pair of pink sweats lined in fleece, soft and comfortable and protective against the world. They’re a security blanket to hold onto as she rifles through drawers in the kitchen until she finds her house key. It takes a few minutes, but she gets it and leaves, locking the door on her way out. She doesn’t have a car, but the downtown area- which is really just four intersecting streets- is within walking distance and the movers pointed the address out to her on their way by a couple days ago. 

Each step is draining, but she takes them because she has to. Admittedly, the cool, fresh air feels nice in her throat and she hasn’t taken a good, long walk in a while. She used to jog around her neighborhood, and then her campus, just for the way it feels after. The sting in her muscles, the ache in her chest, the energy that slowly burns itself away as dopamine and adrenaline stop spreading themselves around her often overworked brain.This isn’t more than a couple miles, and she’s only walking, but it feels like a start. She’s out of practice anyways, and quickly gets out of breath. 

Thankfully, when she arrives at the office, there’s a water cooler in the corner that she helps herself to three full cups of before approaching the receptionist and nodding when she’s asked if she’s Sarah Reese. She’ll be talking for a while, and that’ll take a fair amount of energy for the day. 

“Have a seat for a minute, I’ll let her know you’re here.”

Sarah sits down on one of the hard chairs and crumples her paper cup in her hand because she can. Destroying things is cathartic, and she contemplates going home, ripping open her box of dishes, and breaking every single plate until her entire floor is nothing but shards of broken glass digging into her feet. Maybe it’s not a healthy coping mechanism, but she considers it until a kind woman with greying hair, cat eye glasses, and pink lipstick that has started to feather around her mouth. The color is a bti garish, but that makes it safe, in a way. Sarah comes forward, drops her cup in the little teal trash can, and follows into the office.

A comfortable armchair faces an overly soft couch, which Sarah sits on gingerly. She knows of Dr. Riley, knows she’s well liked and respected, but that doesn’t mean she knows her or is already comfortable talking about herself. That sort of thing takes time. She’s only been in town for three days, although it feels like much longer with the way her sense of time distorts nowadays.

“Good morning, Sarah,” Dr. Riley says warmly. 

Sarah nods.

“You know I looked through some of your old therapist’s notes, and I’ll be talking to them while we treat you, but I want to know you outside of that. Can you start by telling me about yourself? Maybe about your childhood, or how you’re settling in, or what you were studying at school?”

The last question slithers around each of Sarah’s ribs in a slow suffocation before she tries speaking. It’s alright. She wasn’t going to answer it anyways. “I’ve met my neighbors,” she answers. “Maggie and Olivia and their son, Noah. We had dinner last night, and Olivia and I had breakfast yesterday.”

Dr. Riley writes something in her notepad, which Sarah absolutely doesn’t internally panic about for a brief moment before she reigns herself back in. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. There’s someone right outside the door, and a window with easy access, and a heavy lamp to Sarah’s right for self defense, should she need it. She’s okay.

“Tell me about that.”

For a good half hour, Sarah finds herself talking about Maggie and Olivia’s kindness, about how well they mesh and how much their house feels like a home. From there, she starts talking about how much she wants a home like that, because she can’t help it. However, she pointedly doesn’t mention Ava, nor the thrill that ran her at the realization that women can marry other women and be happy. What a dream she had never considered before.

But then she’s thinking about those very things, and it draws Dr. Riley’s attention when she falls silent in an effort to avoid talking about them. 

“Sarah?”

“Do you believe in mermaids?” she blurts out.

It sounds stupid. A child’s fantasy, a crazy woman’s desperate attempt to cling to something good when the world is crumbling around her into little pieces that she cannot put back together. The way real glass shatters, not the fake attempt that is mostly large shards. The words are out there, though, and cannot be taken back no matter how much Sarah wishes on the contrary. 

However, instead of being concerned or asking Sarah if she sees things that aren’t there, Dr. Riley smiles at her and shifts in her chair. “Seen one already? We’ve got a pod around here, off the coast a ways. Everyone who lives here has seen them at some point, but usually not unless they’ve been here a while. The mermaids can be shy- or mean.”

That’s not the response she had been expecting, but Sarah relaxes immediately. She’s not crazy. Neither is Olivia, nor Maggie. This is normal here. Her relief must show on her face because Dr. Riley laughs a little and goes over to her desk and returns with a framed photograph of a dark haired woman, gleaming grey tail splashing in the waves as she sits on the rocks, her hair covering her chest modestly, unlike Ava in real life or any of the photos. 

“This is Brianne. We have dinner together from time to time.”

A question strikes Sarah as she studies Brianne’s hands splayed in her lap. 

“You said they have a pod? Like dolphins?”

“You could put it that way.”

She nods thoughtfully. “So if one were trapped, like, tangled in a net, wouldn’t the others help her?”

“Of course.”

Then why was Ava alone? Sarah doesn’t voice the question, but it clings to her as Dr. Riley puts the picture back where it was. It might have something to do with the way Ava stopped appearing in photographs, and something is familiar about being cut off from everyone. The way her only friends abandoned her when she told them what he did to her. Packing her things all on her own without anyone there to save her. 

Next thing she knows, Dr. Riley is telling her what she’d like her to do before their next session in a few days; she should keep trying to socialize with the neighbors, and she should reach out about how she feels. If she knew Sarah needed to get necessities for the house, she’d probably tell her to buy those, too. 

After she leaves, reemerging into late morning air, Sarah looks around the block. There’s a general store, a bakery, a boutique, a gift shop- just a few little staples, one of which she stops at to finally pick up basics for around the house. But at the end of the “downtown” area, there’s a large building- or rather, one medium building with two smaller ones near it, with a sign outside she can’t read from this distance. Something draws her to it, and she doesn’t read the sign before approaching, looking at the well kept local grass growing, but not too tall, around the area. She hears voices and follows them, all the way to the back of the building, where a handful of men and women are tending to a lush garden of flowers and such, pulling up weeds. When she gets closer, she recognizes one of the women.

“Olivia?”

Olivia stands up and smiles, wiping her work gloves on loose, stained denim pants. “Hey, what’s up?”

She shrugs in answer. “I was just wandering around, is all. Looking for something to do with my day.”

“Well, if you want-” Olivia kneels in the dirt again and grabs a spare pair of dirty work gloves, “-you can join us. It’ll only take an hour or so, but it’s rewarding.”

An hour sounds like a long time, and Sarah wants to go home. But something calls her to stay, and she takes the gloves, slides them onto her too-small hands, and looks for plants that don’t belong. Everyone is chattering happily, and make an effort to pull her into the conversation without forcing her to take part. It feels nice to be a part of something, if she’s honest.

The work isn’t hard, and it goes by quickly before Olivia stands up and bids everyone goodbye, says she’ll see them later. Only then does Sarah dare to ask where she is, and Olivia gives her this proud, eager smile that fits on her face as naturally as the wedding band on her finger.

“This is the temple. It’s not much, but it’s ours, and I’m proud of it.”

“Oh.”

Sarah doesn’t entirely understand, but she doesn’t have to in order to like it. It’s something that makes people happy and brings them together, and on a day when she has more energy, perhaps she’ll ask more questions or give it all a more thorough look. For now, though, she walks off with Olivia and they head home in companionable silence, another invitation extended for dinner that Sarah accepts because she has yet to go grocery shopping.

They part at the front step and Sarah, because she can’t help it, goes back down to the shore after setting down her groceries, rolling up her pants and crossing her arms over her chest in the cold wind. She wants to see Ava again, but doubts she will. She ran off last time, after all, and that’s not usually grounds for a warm welcome.

However, as she approaches the tidepools, she hears a familiar splash, and looks out at the water to see eyes peering at her over the slow waves. Blue. Familiar. Ava. Sarah wants to say something, but all the words die in her throat instead of making it to her lips and tongue.

Slowly, Ava comes closer, until she’s shallow enough that her whole upper body is out of water and she folds her arms on the rocks, resting her chin on them, and lazily swishes her tail in the water.

“You left,” she says in a stiff voice like windless summer days. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Ava makes the same trilling sound from the day before and smiles, revealing an unnatural edge to her teeth. They’re beautiful, though. Less threatening than a human mouth would be for Sarah, strangely enough. She smiles back and slides down the rock to sit on it, her calves in the water, almost to the rolled-up hem of her sweats.

“I want to show you something, but you have to trust me.”

Sarah shouldn’t trust her. But Ava is so kind, has such an open and real look on her face, the kind it’s easy to sink into like a warm bed on a cold wintry day. She nods, and Ava tugs at her ankle, about to pull her in. Instead of panicking, Sarah pulls away and sheds her sweatpants, too fond of them to ruin them in the sea, and throws them back to safety in one of the last tidepools before the cliffside, hoping they won’t go too far.

When Ava pulls at her again, Sarah allows her without another thought.


	5. Chapter 5

Ava les go of Sarah’s leg rather quickly in favor of interlacing their fingers and swimming to the North, up the coast, pulling Sarah along effortlessly and helping her keep her head above water although her own keeps going down to breathe easier through the gills on the side of her neck. Although they’re only moving for a few minutes, maximum, it feels a lot longer. Salt slaps at Sarah’s cheeks, tangles her hair. Fish brush against her legs. Seaweed tangles her ankles. But it’s good, it’s freeing. She feels more alive than she has in a long time, simply coming along wherever Ava’s taking her. 

They wind up in a little inlet carved into the side of one of the cliffs, several feet deep, but sheltered from the worst of the waves and weathered smooth over time. It feels like a little home, which is must be because Ava dives down and comes back up with a little pouch woven of seaweed, which she opens to reveal a collection of beautiful iridescent shells, the likes of which Sarah has never seen. They’re almost like pearls pressed flat, and their opposite sides are blue and brown and black, mimicries of the ocean from which they came. Beautiful, she thinks, and stares reverently as Ava holds the pouch open.

“As a thank you,” Ava says, and presses the pouch into Sarah’s hands, meaning she has to work harder to tread water with her legs and stay afloat. “I would have died, if you didn’t help me.”

Sarah’s inclined to ask about the pod, why none of them would help, but some things should not be asked, only heard when the time is right. She knows she’d be unable to talk about her own trauma right now to someone she’s only just met, and it’s only reasonable to wait for Ava to say things in her own time.

And when her legs start to tire, muscles burning, she doesn’t have to say a word before Ava slides one arm under her legs, right at the crook of her knees, and loops the other around her back. The weight of holding herself up vanishes immediately. Sarah is, for the first time in as long as she can remember, being held. It doesn’t seem to strain Ava, either, who starts floating aimlessly on top of foamy waves with Sarah in her grasp, oblivious or uncaring in regards to how close they are.

The farther they drift from the coast, the more alive the ocean becomes around them. The fish are teeming and visible, darting around them, and the dolphins she saw earlier are now almost close enough to touch- and they’re much bigger than Sarah could have ever thought. She wants to reach out and skim a hand across the sleek surface of their skin, but settles for just holding the seaweed pouch delicately in her palms and letting Ava hold her afloat amid waves.

There’s something restless about the ocean, and a matching comfort to said restlessness which gives her a strange sense of peace. It’s hard to feel like a personification of chaos in the middle of the choppy waters. Above them, the light clouds part ever so slightly in a warm splash of sun, not burning the way it often is elsewhere, but rather soothing and comforting. Like curling up in soft sheets on a cool summer morning, feeling loved and safe, without a single concrete worry in the world to taint sweet smiles. The sun is natural as it bathes her, and sets Ava aglow.

As her tail moves to keep them afloat, the sun reflects off it at various angles in a dazzling show of blue and gold and silver, pretty things like within a treasury instead of here. Here, on Ava, whose arms show off wiry muscle with the effort of holding Sarah up and close. She wants to trace the swell and curve of those muscles, same as she wants to touch the sharp angle of Ava’s jawline, stroke her scales, press her thumb against rosy lips, touch faintly scarred skin stretching in patterns across her bare upper body. There are a good number of them, mostly faded to pale white-pinks although some retain a grey-purple hue with how badly she was hurt. The curiosity burns in again, but Sarah knows it isn’t her place to ask.

“You’re new here?” Ava asks suddenly.

“Hmm?”

“You’re new here? I have never seen you, before yesterday.”

“Oh.” Sarah recalls yesterday again. The way it felt to be kissed. Someone she barely knows, someone so radiant, kissed her. “Yeah, I only moved in a couple of days ago. But I’m here to stay, so…”

She isn’t entirely sure why she says that last part; she doesn’t plan to stay here for very long, just until she’s well enough to go back to school. It feels like the right thing to say, though, the sort of implication of permanence she’s never quite been able to grasp. Everything has existed in a state of “for now” her whole life, and it’s strange to say, let alone consider being here for an extended amount of time. 

But nonetheless, Ava smiles when she says it and kisses Sarah again, just as suddenly, although this one lands on her cheek and leaves a brand that she will be feeling for the rest of the day, if not her entire life.

“This is a good place. It’s nice,” Ava replies, although her voice sounds a bit thin, as though it’s passing through layers of filters before exiting her mouth.

“Yeah, my neighbors are great.”

Sarah means to say more, but then she catches sight of a large wave cresting not too far out from them. She starts to say a warning, but before she can, it’s turning at the top, about to crash over them, and there isn’t time. Between one moment and the next, she tightens her hold at the top of the pouch, throws an arm around Ava’s shoulders, and desperately tries not to inhale water or open her eyes into the salt. The world spins around her, out of control, and she doesn’t know which way is up for what feels like an hour. But it can’t be long, because her lungs are only beginning to burn when her head breaks water all over again and she’s staring at Ava all over again and she realizes that she wasn’t even scared, which is, in of itself, terrifying. She feels safe in Ava’s arms, who she’s known one day and who lives in the water and who she knows nothing about.

“I’ll take you back,” Ava says gently, adjusting Sarah’s body with ease so that she’s straddling Ava’s hips, right above where she melts into scales, ankles interlocked and their faces inches apart. One slender hand raises to cup Sarah’s face, brush soaked curls out of the way, brush the skin under her eye with reverence. “I’ll see you again?”

The only thing Sarah is capable of is nodding and relaxing into Ava’s safe grip as they swim back to shore, not fast or slow, but simply going, aided by smaller waves which propel them back to what turns into the tidepools. Far away, Sarah can see her sweatpants waiting, and even further in the distance, she’s able to make out her house, simple and sterile and not entirely her home so much as a place where she rests her head at night, not even on a pillow.

“You’ll see me again,” she answers as Ava helps her climb back up on the rocks before vanishing with nothing but a flick of her tail.

It feels awkward walking all the way back, picking up her damp sweatpants, and walking home half-naked and soaking wet, clutching what looks like a wad of seaweed to anyone else. She should be self conscious about it, but instead, she can only think about Ava’s smile and touch. It felt right. Perfect.

As Sarah pushes herself in the front door, she’s still remembering the way Ava’s hands felt on her. Their ghosts trace against her hips as she sets the seaweed and shells on her counter, tosses her sweatpants with the dirty clothes she changed out of last night, and heads straight to her shower. She had the presence of mind earlier to put her bag of toiletries on the counter, but they barely get a second gland before she gets into the shower, grabs the detachable head, and lays down in the tub, and turns on the water, warm but not too hot. She doesn’t want to see herself, touch herself, but she wants something good, something which has her thinking about the cords of Ava’s muscles and the way she bites her bottom lip. Pointedly, Sarah does not think about her chest, but rather anything else she can imagine. It’s less real that way.

She takes care of herself and then, lying breathless as the water sprays her thighs harmlessly and still wearing her soaked shirt and boxers, she wonders if the reason she said she’s here to stay is because she’s supposed to. But the thought is too much for right now, and Sarah simply peels her clothes off and fumbles at the far counter for her shampoo.


	6. Chapter 6

Exhausted and somehow also invigorated, Sarah has the presence of mind to put her hair up, brush her teeth, throw on clean clothes, and even pull on fuzzy socks after her shower. A pressure has been lifted, one that has itched at her since she was initially committed. She’s needed this, almost. To have ownership of her body again. Her feet slip on the wood with socks on now, guiding her towel over wet spots she’s left. She’s lighter right now, but it only lasts a few precious minutes of putting towels into the cupboard and pushing her boxes against the living room wall before she’s tired again. But she’s done something, and in spite of how small it was, it feels like a world of difference. Before she lets herself relax, however, she sits at the breakfast bar and opens the seaweed to look at the shells. They’re slightly damp, somewhat sandy, but beautiful nonetheless as she arranges them in a neat line, some face down to show the convex curve that reminded her of the ocean earlier, others face up to reveal their beautiful insides. There’s a metaphor here, albeit one she can’t quite come up with.

Sarah glances at her clock and knows she should be heading toward dinner next door soon. Since she arrived, she realizes the only food she’s had has been from Maggie and Olivia. She almost feels bad, but her craving for kindness overpowers it and she finds herself on their doorstep again, relegated to the kitchen table to entertain Noah while they finish cooking. They weave around each other like an intricate dance only they know. Love blesses the air around them heavily, and it’s good. It’s good. 

Before long there’s a full plate of food in front of her, chicken and vegetables and a salad and a slice of buttered bread, and it’s the sort of family meal she’s always missed out on. 

“Hot,” Olivia tells Noah as she pulls apart pieces of chicken to set on his tray. 

“Ah!” Noah answers, and grabs one in his small fist to shove in his mouth.

Maggie laughs, and as they dig into dinner, Sarah’s still thinking entirely about Ava, and she almost has no choice but to ask about how they all know each other, why she stopped appearing in photos. The question spills out without permission, and she has an apology ready to follow it when Maggie reaches out to take Olivia’s hand in reassurance. 

“After she separated from her pod,” Maggie starts, rubbing her thumb gently over Olivia’s knuckles in a tender gesture that comes so naturally to them, “she washed up on the beach. She was really young, and we were new here, and didn’t know we could ask for help. She had been hurt bad by something- she never said what- and we cleaned her up, caught fish for her until she was feeling better and could start hunting on her own. We kind of adopted her for a while. On holidays, we’d come down and celebrate with her. We’d usually eat dinner together. She was like our daughter…” Maggie’s voice cracks.

“And a couple years ago,” Olivia says, jumping into the space Maggie can no longer fill, “the adoption agency called us and said that a woman nearby was giving up her baby as soon as they were born. We were so excited because we loved- love- Ava, but we’d always wanted a kid, and he’d be with us all the time, we’d be able to spend more time with him. We told her, and she knew we would never- we weren’t going to abandon her. Noah wasn’t going to take us away from her. But we showed her his ultrasound one night. The next day, she didn’t show up in the shallows, the caves. We still look for her a lot but she… we haven’t seen her since.”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says, because there’s nothing else to say.

Although Olivia waves a hand dismissively, the mood for the evening has shifted to a more somber one as the couple think about what they’ve lost and Sarah wonders what hurt Ava, cast her out, and most of all, why she came to Sarah for help yesterday. Too many questions, not enough answers, but a very clear expression of a mistake all burn into her chest and she knows, she knows she’s got to leave them be as soon as dinner is over. 

After they quietly finish eating, Sarah offers to help with the dishes but is told no, and Maggie invites her for breakfast in the morning if she’s up to it, and Olivia kisses her forehead, and Noah waves his hand at her dramatically. Then she’s out under the stars, and her feet take her back to the ocean, to the tidepools where she can dangle her feet in the water, watch the stars, and think about Ava the way she shouldn’t be thinking about anyone. She has had so much taken, and now has nothing left to give.

But it’s nice, either way, to let cold air strike her nose and water lap at her calves. There’s life here, more life in this sleepy village than there was at school. And that which resides here, it’s fundamentally good and welcoming. There are no imposing bookcases and mahogany desks which can dig into her back while a cold hand covers her mouth. She doesn’t have that, now. Instead there’s a peace she’s tracked down in only three days.

She realizes, as the moon glows over the shifts in the waves, that she’s waiting for Ava to show up, even though she isn’t sure what she’d do if the mermaid did. There are no words waiting on the tip of her tongue, or potential energy in her arms. She’s just waiting, the way she waits for a lot of things, and watching the world move on a little slower than usual.

Sarah doesn’t know how long she waits, but it feels like a while before she heads home and makes it, just barely, to her bare mattress instead of the couch. A single pillow cushions her head, and the surface is much more gentle with her body as her eyes slip shut and she knows, she knows that there may actually be something to the idea that living here will be nothing but good for her recovery.

It is good, for the next month or so. Sarah goes to her appointments, and she spends early afternoons floating in the water with Ava, and then has dinner with Olivia, Maggie, and Noah. Sometimes she goes to help with the garden behind the temple, others she helps tend to the smaller one lining the pink house next door. She has something to do, and people to talk to, and a plain mattress to sleep on at night because half of her boxes remain unopened in the corner of the living room. From time to time, she rearranges them, but that’s it. Her mother pays the rent, and gives an allowance which lets Sarah buy food to bring to dinner most nights as well as pay for her therapy. There’s peace in the little town, and the taste of salt on her lips as waves crash over her.

The entire time, Ava does not kiss her again.

But each day they spend time together, and it feels so natural to be out in the middle of endless waters with Ava, where nothing else can reach them, if for no other reason than because they can. Every so often, Ava presents her with shells, which join the little collection on the kitchen counter, and it’s good. Things are good. 

Slowly, Sarah also gets better, or so she thinks. She stops thinking about him as much, and she brushes her teeth every day and showers most days. A couple of times, she’s managed to go for little walks around the neighborhood which feel just as full of good things as ocean floating and firm arms around her. She’s doing better, until the first day it rains, and she feels so many things, so many knots of pain tied tightly begin to fall apart.

The rain reminds her too much of tears, of the weather outside too many days ago, and as she hears it drill against the sides of her house, she remembers the sound of other things too. A quiet voice barely carries over the heavy rain, sinks into thick spines of old books and reflects off picture frames. The rain makes her think of hands on her hips, under her shirt, in her waistband. She doesn’t mean to remember it all, but she does, and the memories are heavy as she grabs one of the chairs at her breakfast bar and hits it against the ground with as much force as she can muster. It feels good to break things, sometimes. When the legs go in all different directions and the wood splinters, she feels better for just long enough to forget again. But the rain carries on, and so does she, and once she’s destroyed every last one of her chairs, she runs down to the beach and sits at the tidepools and waits for someone who won’t show up for hours. She waits, though, and isn’t afraid of the waves rising higher and higher, until each one soaks her chest, and one finally manages to pull her off her perch.

Funny enough, she doesn’t mind. Either she’ll see Ava again, or she’ll be swept away, and the ocean has begun to soothe her in the month she’s spent learning its tides and the bright sea life. The water keeps her buoyant mostly, but the waves overcome her often, and each time she surfaces to cough and draw a new breath, she doesn’t have long before she’s under again.

As tides pull her away, farther and farther from safety, she can’t help wondering if Maggie and Olivia will still set a plate out for her tonight, and leave it on the table long after it becomes clear she won’t be there tonight. They seem the sort to do that, she thinks. They’re kind women. Wives who have a family like Sarah never has and never will.

The next wave that overtakes her doesn’t allow her back up, and once her chest begins to hurt and instinct has her clawing to the surface, she can’t entirely figure out which way is up. She aches, in every part of her body, and when something cushions her body she assumes it must be the sea floor and tries to swim away from it, upward, but her body is simply too weak. She can’t do anything but stay, and by the time she’s in the air again, she’s too dizzy to know she’s alright.


	7. Chapter 7

Upon coming to, the first thing Sarah recognizes is the smell. Damp, decidedly oceanic, and a little too humid for her to take a good breath in. It’s probably a good sign that she can breathe at all, really, given that her last memory is the horrific experience of beginning to drown. She looks around her and sees no one else, but she knows she’s safe because these are the caves where she found Ava for the very first time. 

Sarah struggles to sit up, and even that much has her head spinning again, which maybe isn’t all that great. She should go to a hospital in case there’s still water in her lungs, but she doesn’t have a car and she’s pretty sure the nearest real hospital is in the next town over. And she probably can’t even walk home, given that sitting up is such a chore. Right as she’s about to start calling for help, she sees shadows at the mouth of the cave, and familiar voices wash over her.

“She’s in here.”

Clearly struggling to get in through the shallow waters of the cave entrance is Ava, who seems much more at ease when she reaches the deeper waters in the middle and looks up at Sarah with anxiety written across her face and tension pulling at her shoulders. Right behind her come Maggie and Olivia, both with pinched expressions.

“Sarah, are you okay? Can you hear me?” Olivia asks.

Sarah nods, and then Maggie picks her up to carry out of here, which she very much appreciates although it sets off her dizziness once more. Maggie is warm, thankfully, and Sarah can’t resist trying to lean into it more because she feels cold all over from the water and the wind and the rain.

As she’s carried away, she sees Ava lingering, touching the space where Sarah had been laying and making the saddest, smallest trilling sound like a mixture between a hum and a cry. Sarah wishes she had the words to reassure her, but alas her mind has none, and on top of it, she isn’t too confident in her throat’s ability to bring the sound into biting air.

Maggie brings her back to her house, instead of Sarah’s own, and lays her on the overstuffed couch while Olivia gets a thermometer, which she puts in Sarah’s ear and holds there until it beeps and says that her temperature is a little low, but less than a degree from normal, so it’s alright enough. They tuck blankets around her.

She just lays there now, letting the women take care of her. She feels incredibly safe on their couch, Olivia bringing her tea, Maggie periodically checking on her, Noah toddling over to put toys and stuffed animals in her lap in hopes they’ll make her feel better. It’s yet another reason she feels beyond safe here. Nothing can hurt her when the best women she’s ever known are right here, and with them, she’s fairly certain no one will hurt her. But beyond that, her focus narrows to her rescue. 

Ava had saved her. Found her deep in the water and pulled her to safety, got help. Sarah’s never experienced care, love, like that if she can even call it as such. It’s a bit early, she thinks, but she can’t really call it anything else. There’s no other word for the way she feels right now, the way she feels whenever ava holds her. She loves the feeling of something which may or may not be love.It could be. She doesn’t know. But she wants to, is the thing. To love, to know what it feels like to be loved back. In all her years, it’s something she’s never been able to grasp. Ava could be that, or at least the start, but Sarah is not ready for something so simple and complex at the same time. Perhaps, a day will eventually come where things are easier; there will be a day she can say it’s been ages since she fell apart the way she did this morning.

By the time night begins to find the windows, she gets up and pulls the blanket with her, wrapped around borrowed clothes. Sarah follows noise to the kitchen, to Olivia standing over the sink with dirty dishes, Maggie stirring a bowl of something, and Noah on er hip, grabbing for the whisk. Sarah clears her throat and Olivia smiles at her with red rimmed eyes. She gets the impression she’s done something wrong. An apology surges in her throat but before she can say it, Olivia comes round and pulls her into a hug, the exact sort of hug she wanted from her mother but could never have. Protective. Warm. Safe. She holds until Sarah is ready to pull away and afterward, wipes her cheeks. There are words to be said, but they don’t make it out, because after Olivia comes Maggie, and with Maggie comes something else- total acceptance. A small family. Sarah melts into it with ease, and when it’s over and dinner is served, they all know they have to talk.

The first thing anyone says is Maggie asking her how she feels. Not the contrived way most do, but in a clear and genuine question of her wellbeing. 

“Okay,” Sarah says. And she means it, for the most part. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I know that’s what everyone always asks. =”

Maggie nods slowly, but it’s Olivia who speaks next. “Ava said she didn’t think so- she said she usually brings you out there?”

Another question makes itself known in lieu of a response she ought to be providing. She asks, cautiously and with her hands in her lap, how Ava got their help. Her mind floods with images of Ava dragging herself up the shore, the sand wedging in her scales and her hands scraping on the rocks, struggling to get enough oxygen because she relies heavily on her gills, not just her comparatively weak lungs. In her hazy memory, she recalls seeing Ava before Maggie and Olivia got there. 

“She’s usually closer to the shore on rainy days,” Olivia admits, so we go looking for her most of the time. We found her swimming frantically, almost beaching herself, and she said you needed help. Mags went back for her, but after we got you inside…”

Although Olivia trails off, it’s clear what happened. Ava was gone. Yet again, a speechlessness which does not abate strikes Sarah. Dinner is mostly quiet after that, although occasionally punctuated with Noah’s sweetly voice. She feels, all in all, a little heavy and a little light at the same time. It’s a strange mixture, one not completely unwelcome. Today has felt a conflict of depths she’s worked hard to crawl out of and a realization she’s a great deal less alone than she thought. It’s a pleasant day, with the sums of both taken into account and the good coming to outweigh the bad. She sees the same in Olivia and Maggie. They saw someone they once loved like a daughter for the first time in years, but they also lost her all over again just as quickly. 

Sarah’s never had children herself and has only the faintest inkling of if she wants to, and should she, if she ever will/ But she knows Maggie and Olivia love how mothers are supposed to love, and a show something like that has her thinking about children in a way she hasn’t before.

As the night closes itself around her, and she has to go home, she finds herself tearing into the box of things for her kitchen, thinking of cooking for a family the way Maggie and Olivia do. She moves slowly, but moves all the same. She puts things away and thinks about going shopping for the food to make a meal for them soon. Probably in the beginning reaches of winter when warmth is much desired and rainfall of memories drown her frequently. And when she dreams, curled up on the couch for restless sleep, she dreams of cooking a meal for Ava too someday.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE WEEK!

The day after nearly drowning goes by slow. Sarah eats breakfast with Olivia and Maggie, goes to therapy, and spends an afternoon at the beach in hopes of seeing Ava. More than anything, she wants to see her again. Thank her, perhaps, for saving her life, and ask that she see Olivia and Maggie again. She isn’t sure how, but isn’t opposed to attempting a reunion she would never be able to handle for herself. But it would be the kind of good Dr. Riley always tells her to put into the world. For as heavy as these thoughts fall, they mean nothing if she can’t find Ava.

Which, after twenty minutes or so of searching, she doesn’t. It burns in a familiar way, the rejection, although she tries not to think of it that way. Her eyes and nose begin to burn the longer she searches alone. Like before, she looks at tidepools and skims light hands along mussels and sticky anemones. Used to this as she is, it’s different alone now that she knows otherwise. She looks around and knows who she’s looking for and what she’d like to do. Her thoughts return to the first day they met. Ava kissing her. They haven’t kissed like that since. Sarah wants it again, craves it, and also knows how likely it is that she'll never have that again.

Fog and heavy clouds roll in and out above the ocean, indecisive over whether or not they’d like to rain some more. Sarah votes no, and the weather listens to her. The tidepools bustle beside her, busy in the low tide, and she watches life scuttle and survive, carry on in a way she herself is only just learning to do. It would be nice, she thinks, to live in a tidepool, although they seldom last. Maybe she’s meant to, then.

She should ask around about a library, maybe read about tidepools. And she should borrow the ocean life books from Olivia again because it might help her figure out where Ava is and why she hasn’t seen her. She misses her more than she thought she would. Sarah thinks about getting in the ocean, but then she recalls yesterday and there’s a cold fear in her stomach of how out of control she felt, how afraid, how pained, as she nearly drowned.

As she watches the waves, she catches sight of fins and instinctively slips down slightly into the water, expecting it to be Ava, coming to see her and take her somewhere peaceful. But then there are more fins, more tails, like a pod. Sarah wonders what kind, but then she sees heads poking above the water. Human heads. Oh. This is Ava’s family, or perhaps used to be. She has questions, but they’re too far away to ask and she doesn’t trust her ability to swim out there, so she watches.

They seem to be talking to each other, laughing, the smaller ones- children- chasing each other in and out of the waves. It’s a family like Olivia and Maggie and Noah, but it’s also very different, she thinks as she watches the way the children wander off and the adults don’t seem to mind. Olivia and Maggie would mind if Noah wandered off. But no one stops the children, and they come nearer to the shallows. One of them ducks beneath the waves and pops back up with a fish in its mouth, twitching and struggling around sharp teeth. Ava’s teeth aren’t quite that sharp. They’re more human. Sarah wonders why.

Before she has the chance to dwell, one of the children swims up to her and looks at her with curious eyes of vertical slit pupils. 

“Hello,” she says carefully.

The child studies her and reaches for one of her hands, which she offers without hesitation. She can’t imagine refusing. But as soon as she offers it, the child pulls her into the water and sinks their teeth into her palm. She cries out and they let go, quickly swimming away, their scales flashing in the light as they call in another language to the others. A little afraid of a swarm, Sarah hurries out of the water and back up the beach, sand clinging to her toes and blood dripping from her hand. At least it hurts. In school, they said if it didn’t hurt, it was because there was too much nerve damage. So if it hurts- which it really does- then it’s a good sign. Maybe. The blood stains sand and her shirt as she runs to Maggie and Olivia, because she trusts that they’ll help her. At the very least they have something her own home doesn’t: bandaids. 

“What the fuck,” she hisses to herself as she goes.

Usually animals bite when they feel threatened. She doesn’t think she did or said anything threatening. Not even on accident. The more she reviews her actions, the more confused she becomes and the more her palm seems to throb. Sarah chances a look at her hand and sees the neat ring of tiny puncture wounds.

When she arrives at the pink house, Noah is in the yard, playing with his toys as Olivia tends to the little garden along the edges of their home. “Liv,” Sarah calls out, hiding her arms behind her back to protect Noah from the blood. “Do you have bandaids?”

Olivia stands up and wipes her hands on plenty-stained jeans. “Yeah, c’mon in. Noah, sweetheart, let’s go inside for a few minutes.”

Noah whines and pouts, but nonetheless pushes himself to his feet and toddles indoors after Olivia with one of his favorite toys in hand. It’s certainly something that Sarah knows which ones are his favorites. She doesn’t know what to do about that. But when she’s inside and Olivia reaches for the first-aid kit on top of the fridge, asking what happened, Noah clears from her mind and she hesitantly produces her still-bleeding hand.

“Sarah!” Olivia exclaims, immediately grabbing a hand-towel and wetting it to begin cleaning the blood. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugs.

“What happened?”

After the blood is mostly cleaned, Olivia studies the bite and pulls out a yellow tube of cream to rub onto the line of marks. She’s so careful, as if Sarah were her daughter. She wishes she was her daughter. Then comes a gauze pad and an ace wrap to hold it in place around the curve of her hand. A deeper bite would’ve taken her thumb off.

“There were more mermaids,” she says in spite of herself. “A lot of them. Kids, too. One swam up to me and asked for my hand, and then they bit me.”

“It’s because you’re human and you were in their space. They bite Ava, too.”

“Oh.”

After the bandage is secure, Olivia puts the first aid kit back up, washes her hands, and sits across from Sarah at the breakfast bar. “You were looking for her, weren’t you?”

It’s not really a question.

“I wanted to say thank you, and I wanted to see her again.”

“I know.”

They’re quiet for a moment, before Olivia stands up and reaches for a flyer on her freezer. “We’re pulling beach grass on the dunes this afternoon, if you’re up to it,” she says, handing Sarah the paper. “Sometimes Ava sits in the shallows and watches. If we don’t bother her, she doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Why pull up the grass?”

Olivia’s whole face opens and she runs out of the room, only to return with a couple of books and a stack of printed articles about how the grass got there, the damage it’s done, the progress they’re making. Endangered plants on the return. Bees coming back. All because people clean up. 

“It’s tedious,” she admits, “but it feels good. We see Ava a lot, even if we can’t talk to her. When she isn’t there, the pod usually is. They like that we’re fixing things. Once or twice, they’ve brought us fish and thrown them up to us on the sand. They’re nice when we’re helping.”

“Have they ever spoken to you?”

“No,” Olivia says sadly, but doesn’t let it overcome her. “I do have extra gloves, however. Maggie’s staying home with Noah tonight. They’ll protect you from the sand.”

For longer than she means to, Sarh thinks about it. About going out and doing something instead of sitting in her house or searching fruitlessly for Ava. It would be nice. But it sounds like a lot of work, and she’s not sure if she’s up to the effort it cries for. Olivia seems hopeful, though. Excited. And Sarah’s a people pleaser, occasionally to a fault, so she says she’ll do it.

The next half hour is spent with Olivia finding work clothes for Sarah that’ll fit her, and then waiting for Maggie to come home while they weed the garden, and finally a rather long drive to the right area of the coast.

As soon as they arrive and begin hiking out to the dunes, surrounded by people who laugh and talk and joke together, Sarah scans where the native plants and plethora of insects thin, and the ground is barren save for thin sprouts peeking through the dirt, and then it turns into the thick beach grass that lays in a carpet over the landscape.

“We’re just pulling the sprouts that came back today,” Olivia says. “I’ll show you how. Make sure you get all of the root, too, or they’ll just show up again.”

Sarah watches Olivia dig, and she mirrors the action, which earns a litany of praises. She does it again, gets into the rhythm of digging and pulling and finding the roots. But every so often, she looks up and scans the water for a familiar face or flash of scales. So, so badly she wants to find Ava. Even if it’s just a glance, she’d do anything to see her again.

She works through the exhaustion in her muscles. The throb of her bite wound. The grit of hot sand on her forearms. The wind that blows grime into her face. She works through all of it until they’ve cleared a good chunk of land and the sun is setting, and still, she does not find what she’s been so desperately searching for. The reward of what she’s done loses out to disappointment.

“Maggie and Noah and I will be here Friday night for dinner and blessings and all that,” Olivia says. “You can come with us if you want. If not, I can recommend a place in town, or I can make something for you before we go.”

“It’s not your responsibility to take care of me,” Sarah mumbles.

“No, but I want to. Now, c’mon, let’s get showered and see what Maggie made for dinner.”


	9. Chapter 9

After dinner and a shower in which Sarah wraps her hand in a sandwich bag to protect her bandages, she goes back down to the beach, wary of the pod but hoping again to see Ava, although she doubts she will. The high tide has turned the tide pools into simply a rugged landscape under the water, one which she is all too familiar with navigating as she wades under the stars in hopes of something familiar returning to her. She’s careful to keep her hand dry, but the rest of her quickly soaks and she contemplates getting a bathing suit at some point. It’s probably better than soaking all her clothes in seawater and getting sand in everything. Even just a dedicated pair of boxers would be better at this point.

But her clothes weigh her down as she stands in the tidepools, feet in the algae, water lapping at the backside of her knees in a way that implies intimacy, almost; it makes her think of fluttering kisses, tender moments, a togetherness that she’s never fully been able to explore because her only experience with romance outside of Ava, if that counts, is a professor who dimmed the lights and took advantage, and that’s probably not romance either. Romance isn’t looking anywhere but at pictures of a daughter Sarah’s age, maybe a little older, as she loses the last of her clinging threads of tenacity.

She shakes her head rapidly, as though that will clear the thoughts from her mind, free her from her past. If it was so easy, she wouldn’t be in this town in the first place, but rather, still at school with her head buried in a textbook. In another universe, that’s what she’s probably doing. The summer has faded, and as such, she’d be starting her third year of med school. She’d be living off campus in an apartment with a roommate or two, walking to school in the mornings even when the cold Chicago weather bites at any exposed skin unprotected by her layers of coats and hats and scarves. It made her feel alive, in the past. Now she craves warmth more than she knew to be possible before. 

The stars begin to poke out from the velvet night above her, and the longer she stands there, the less she sees. Ava isn’t here. Not having seen her since before nearly drowning, she wonders if perhaps she imagined her in the first place, as well as the other mermaids, and everyone is playing along to be polite. But she has the bite on her hand as proof, the first time she’s had to worry about bandages in a while as her arm has gotten around to healing and, for the most part, she’d been leaving it alone before all this. The raw skin attests that she may need a barrier to protect her from her own coping mechanisms.

The waves get a little higher, a little choppier, and slap her shins and the rocks with ferocity as the moon itself rises. She looks because she can’t help herself, and prays that by some miracle, Ava will just show up. Just arrive and make it all better. But Dr. Riley has been saying a lot about not putting all her self worth and happiness in the hands of one person. This could just be karma. Sarah laughs bitterly for no one to hear and imagines drowning all over again. It wasn’t fun, but maybe it would be simple.

As soon as she has the thought, Sarah scolds herself. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. In spite of a recent setback, she’s been doing better. There’s no reason to just throw it all away. 

Water keeps rushing at her, tugging at her, and she sits on one of the walls of the tidepools to just ride out the higher sprays of water without thoroughly exhausting herself. For what feels like an hour in the darkness peppered only by light dashes of light from the moon and stars, she sits there and wonders when this crosses the line and becomes nothing short of pathetic.

Just as she’s about to give in, give up, there’s a familiar flash in the shallows and a head rises from beneath the ripples. Blonde hair gone silver in the dim light, a pale face, lips Sarah wants nothing more than to kiss all over again. There are a million words waiting to come out, but she voices none of them. Instead, she slips off the rock where she has taken refuge and swims as best as she can to Ava.

The second she’s close enough, cold hands cup her cheeks and she’s pulled in for a salty kiss which she almost believed she would never again experience. Her eyes slip shut and she melts into the touch with ease. It feels like coming home, almost. But it’s over as soon as it started, and she’s just treading water as she drinks in as much of Ava’s face as she can possibly manage. She feels so at ease. So safe.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” she admits.

And Ava just smiles at her, wraps an arm around her to pull their bodies flush together. She’s not as cold as the water, but she’s not warm. All the same, her body is familiar because it’s Sarah’s, too, and she’s looked often enough to have spent time wondering, imagining, how it might feel should she ever be able to look with her sense of touch. Not that she’d ever ask, of course. But right now, she doesn’t have to ask, because Ava offered.

Ava doesn’t say a word, but this right here is enough. They’re enough, together, in the cool water as they hold onto each other like they used to every single day before Sarah lost herself in the memories rain and storms bring. The water moves around them, and somehow they stay still, but some miracle of Ava’s tail moving slowly, occasionally brushing against Sarah’s legs. It’s a reminder that she isn’t all human. And yet, she doesn’t mind.

“The pod around here,” she says suddenly, spurred on by the sudden remembrance that Ava isn’t a person, that she’s another species. “They don’t look like you do.”

“Of course not. They’re Makos.”

The word is familiar, but not enough so for Sarah to recognize it right off the bat. “Makos?”

“That’s what humans call them, I think,” Ava answers. I believe I’m… someone once told me Grunion. I believe that’s the word. They’re like, this big-” she taps either side of Sarah’s face with one hand, still holding her with the other, “-and they come out of the ocean to lay their eggs. Not here, though. I came from…” Ava considers the coast, staring at it head on, and points to her right. “I came from really far that way.”

“I came from really far that way,” Sarah says, pointing straight at the shore. It’s not a lie. Chicago is really far east from here, and maybe a little north or south- she can’t entirely remember. She’s never been good with geography.

Ava nods and smiles, and they don’t talk about it much more. Sarah’s sure she recognizes both the words “Mako” and “Grunion” but will have to look them up later, maybe in Olivia’s book about marine life. Olivia brings up another slew of questions which would, in all likelihood, be too personal to ask. But she wants to. She wants to pull the first real family she’s ever known together, like tightening the seams by pulling on the end of the string.

Instead of saying a word, she relishes in the safety of this moment. She has the chance to be held, to revel in the light sway of the waves around them and starlight and the occasional kisses Ava deigns to give her. They hold on like this for as many minutes as the tide allows, but as it begins to sink back, replenish the tidepools, Ava bids her farewell and Sarah makes her way back to the sand so she can go home and rest. She has no idea what time it is, but her eyes are heavy and her fingertips wrinkly when she gets back home and drops her wet clothes to the floor in a problem for tomorrow. 

She almost goes back to sleep on the couch, but remembers the comfort of last night, of a real blanket around her, and tears open the box of her bedding to pull out a plush comforter and drag it with her all the way to the bedroom. Everything is dusty and strange, unfamiliar, but she collapses onto the soft bed with uncased pillows at the headboard, and realizes how long it’s been since she’s slept somewhere truly comfortable.

As the blanket settles around her in a gift of warmth, she takes a moment to truly question why she hasn’t done this. Unpacking has been hard, each and every step of the way, but this felt easy. Reaching for something to cling to the feeling of arms wrapped around her, refill the empty space in her chest that had been so warm while Ava held her and made her feel worth something. Her physical body temperature rises, but it doesn’t make her feel better. It doesn’t fix the longing left behind.

All she can do in the pitch dark, head pillowed comfortably and hands fisted in the soft duvet, is imagine all the times she might be able to do this again. That full skin on skin contact screams of everything she’s been missing for a long time, perhaps her entire life. It’s something she wants to tell everyone and no one about. It’s a life changing experience that she simply can’t keep out of her immediate thoughts no matter how hard she tries. 

Tomorrow, when she asks about Mako and Grunion, maybe she’ll ask what Ava likes. What she can give her. Because she knows Ava likes shells, but she gets those on her own and there’s little more than fragments on the beach where Sarah can reach them on her own. She just wants something to be able to give her in return for this all-consuming feeling and the mussel shells that still have a home atop her kitchen counter, carefully arranged to display their natural beauty.

When Sarah falls asleep, she dreams of salt-filled kisses and the feeling of arms around her waist.


	10. Chapter 10

Sarah arrives, come the next morning, to Olivia rolling dough on the floured counter as Noah watches cartoons in the living room. It’s a practiced, understood movement with the way the heels of her hands press into the dough and the lean muscles in her arms work to press it out and stretch it and then gather it again. She’s never made bread before, but she’s seen it on TV and everyone knows the importance of kneading. If her hand wasn’t injured, she’d help. Instead, she takes hold of the apples beside Olivia and begins slicing them on the board. 

“Thin slices, please,” Olivia says, her voice slightly breathier than usual as she puts her weight into the dough. “I’m frying them later- they’re Maggie’s favorite.”

“What kind are these? They’re not granny smith,” Sarah says. Olivia usually buys granny smith because Noah likes to eat them with peanut butter.

She smiles, and reaches into the jar next to her for more flour because the dough is sticking more to her fingers. “Honeycrisp. They’re sweet.”

For a while, they don’t talk. Sarah slices the apples thinly and fills the bowl next to her. Olivia kneads the dough, puts it in a bowl, covers it with a towel, and then starts another set. She’s curious what they’re making, but doesn’t ask because they’re peaceful right now. It’s a routine easy to sink into, helping Olivia in the kitchen before breakfast. 

Finally, when she’s finished with the apples and Olivia seems close to finished kneading, Sarah wipes her hands on her sweater absently and asks, “What’s this for?”

“That’s pretzel dough,” Olivia says, pointing to the first bowl, “this is challah, and that’s just to fry tonight.”

“What’s tonight?”

An unreadable expression crosses Olivia’s face for a quick moment, but then vanishes. It’s so quick Sarah almost doesn’t see it. She’s about to apologize, but then Olivia starts gathering up the dough to put in her second bowl.

“It’s the first night of Hanukkah.”

Sarah feels like she should have known that. They used to talk about it in school, she thinks, but it’s been a long time since she put thought into any holiday of any kind. She nods, then, and puts plastic wrap over the top of the bowl so it’s protected in the fridge until Olivia cooks them later tonight. She looks around the house and does note that there’s a menorah in the window that hadn’t been there yesterday.

“We’re going to the dunes tonight,” Olivia says, drawing Sarah from her thoughts. “To light the first candle and celebrate. You can come with us if you want.”

She does want to and, with some amount of hesitation, accepts the invite because she has nothing else to do and she’s still filled with fear that if she goes to see Ava, there will be no one. Or worse, there will only be the Makos, and she’s developed a somewhat healthy fear of them over the last day. Her hand throbs as if to remind her that they’re not as gentle as Ava is. Questions form in her mind that she did mean to ask, but now worries they’re stupid questions. Things she could easily learn herself if she tried, but hasn’t begun to because she’s grown too used to the coddling of the maternal figures next door.

Sarah’s hands move on autopilot when Olivia gets a carton of eggs out of the fridge, cracking them one at a time into the measuring cup and examining them briefly before pouring them into the bowl Olivia is filling with milk, seasonings, and vegetables. Omelettes for breakfast, then. Olivia makes good omelettes, a skill Sarah has never managed to perfect. She empties the carton as instructed, puts it in the recycling, and moves onto turning on the stove and heating up a pan so everything cooks faster.

“I finally saw Ava last night,” she says by way of introduction as she lights the gas stove. “I was worried about her. She seems okay, though.”

Olivia makes a small sound to indicate she’s listening.

“She told me a bit more about them. She said the pod are ‘mako’ and she’s ‘grunion’, do you know what that means?”

For a moment, Olivia pauses, setting down her whisk to tap thoughtful fingers against her bottom lip. “Makos are a type of shark. I think grunions are those fish that beach themselves, down south. I could be wrong, though. You can borrow the species book if you want.”

That’s that, for a while, and they make breakfast, they eat it, they feed Noah. Then it’s out to the garden to weed and tend to the herbs and check on the flowers while Noah plays with his toys on the front step. It’s cold out, cold enough for Sarah’s fingers to go numb beneath the gardening gloves and for the forecast to call for snow later in the week. Wind bites at them as they work, pulls at Sarah’s hair, but she doesn’t mind as much as she normally would because it helps her feel alive. She’s here, she’s working, and last night she slept in a bed after being held by Ava.

“Why celebrate on the dunes?” she asks as they work. “It’s cold out, and a long hike.”f

Olivia’s eyes are far away, wistful. “For Ava. She used to celebrate almost everything with us. We’d go down to the beach and sit with her, pray with her, eat with her. The fried apples were her favorite, just like Maggie. We still go out for the holidays when we can, but she never shows up. We light the menorah on the dunes because wherever she is out there, she’d be able to see it.”

Hearing it aches, deep in Sarah’s chest like she isn’t used to, and she hopes that every year, Ava looks up and sees the lights and knows that she is loved.

Sarah nods in silence and they keep working at the garden until early evening when Maggie comes home and scoops Noah into her arms, hugs him and then pulls Olivia into a kiss and finally drops one on top of Sarah’s head. She’s tired from work, as she often is, but they go inside and Olivia unwraps the dough while Maggie pulls out the apple slices, working as a well-oiled machine. As Olivia begins separating the challah dough, Maggie prepares bowls of flour and other things to fry the apples. Maggie hands her the other dough and asks if she knows how to roll out pretzels. 

She says no, and Maggie shows her, and then they’re all dancing around each other in the kitchen, baking bread on the top shelf of the oven and pretzels on the bottom. Some of them are just normal shaped, some of them Maggie showed her other things to do. The only one Sarah recognizes is the Star of David. And as they bake, Maggie fries the apples and Olivia rolls them in cinnamon and sugar before putting them in a thick Hydro Flask to keep them warm. At some point, they wind up putting things into a cooler and packing a backpack, and Olivia asks Sarah to get Noah’s coat from the closet.

When she goes to look for it, opening the closet, she finds something she’s seen before: a long, flowing coat of light, chiffon-like fabric. It’s almost like a fishing net, but softer, and in a pale mix of blue and pink. She recognizes it from a couple of the later pictures of Ava in the photo album. Without thinking, she pulls it out alongside Noah’s red winter coat. 

As she comes back to the main room, where Maggie is tying Noah’s shoes and Olivia’s hand curls around a small menorah, Olivia’s eyes go straight to Ava’s coat.

“In case she’s there,” Sarah says, half expecting to be told off. Instead, Olivia smiles and nods, holds out her hand for Noah’s coat to help him into it. And Sarah, she holds the coat in her arms like a substitute for the way it feels to be in Ava’s. The safety, the warmth, the love which is the same as what she feels right now but also beyond different and overwhelming. When they get in the car to drive for most of the distance, Noah holding the menorah beside her carefully like it might break, she keeps her grip tight on the coat. If she shuts her eyes, it almost smells like the ocean.

They arrive quickly, and then it’s the same hike they did yesterday, but as the sun is setting around them. Luckily Maggie and Olivia have foresight, and as the world darkens, Olivia pulls out a camping lantern and turns it on to illuminate their path until they reach the peak of the last tall dune, where they all sit down. Maggie spreads a sheet for them to sit on and takes the menorah from Noah’s hands to set in front of them so that it sits at the very crest of the sand. As Olivia pulls out their food, Maggie pulls out a container of candles and a small matchbox. She places just one on the left-most end, which Noah makes a face at.

“It goes on the other side!”

“No,” Maggie corrects gently, reaching out to pull him into her lap, “we want it to face the correct way for the ocean, right? So everyone out there can celebrate too.”

That seems to satisfy him, and Sarah wonders if he knows about Ava, as she lets her fingers rub back and forth over the coat still held tightly in her arms. Olivia starts talking, then, but not in words Sarah understands. If she had to guess, it would be Hebrew. She does, however, recognize from the way Maggie and Noah quiet that it’s likely a prayer. Sarah bows her head and listens, familiarizes herself with the sound of each word, the way they float into the night. Then Maggie says something different that lasts about the same amount of time, and has a slight lilt, almost musicality, to it. And then she strikes a match and uses it to light a second candle, which she places in Noah’s hand. With her guidance, he reaches out and lights the other candle, then places the one in his hand directly in the center of the menorah.

After that they’re praying, and then eating. Sarah’s never considered the concept of fried apples before, but they’re actually really good and she thinks she’d like to eat them more often. As she munches on a warm slice, Noah works through a pretzel and Olivia and Maggie share one of the braided loaves of challah. The air around them feels so warm, in spite of the chill, that Sarah wonders if the love in this little family is so strong it has become tangible. She wouldn’t be very surprised if that was the case.

When she takes another fried apple slice, Olivia digs into her backpack and produces one of those bags of chocolate coins they have at the store and splits it into three even piles. Noah, for his part, reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out three little tops, all with four sides with individual markings. Sarah knows that it’s a dreidel. She also knows there are only three.

“Team with me?” Noah asks, holding out the green one to Sarah. The paint is a little chipped, and the sides somewhat worn from years of use. An heirloom.

“I’ll ‘team’ with you,” she answers, and Noah plops himself happily into her lap while Maggie turns the now empty tupperware that contained pretzels upside down for a flat surface. “How do we do this?”

And Olivia and Maggie teach her, and let Noah explain to her what to do depending on the side their dreidel lands on. It’s an easy game to get ahold of, a simple one that reminds her of being young and happy while Olivia hums some repetitive tune under her breath almost on instinct.

However, each time her and Noah’s turn ends, Sarah looks at the horizon and wishes she could see Ava in the dark waters. No such luck. She tries to focus on the game until Noah begins to get tired, and Maggie and Olivia are packing up.

“Can you carry him back?” Olivia whispers, her hands busy with the lamp as Maggie picks up the menorah. “I don’t wanna wake him.”

Sarah nods they hike back to the car. Maggie goes first, her hand cupped protectively over the flames of the menorah, followed by Sarah and Noah, and Olivia behind them holding the light over her head so they can see their way. Ava’s coat, not very thick but somehow protective, becomes a blanket wrapped around Noah as they walk. Although she didn’t see Ava, Sarah finds herself feeling warm and fulfilled when they get into the car.


	11. Chapter 11

The next morning, after helping Olivia cut more apples and make more dough, Sarah returns to the beach. She’s still fully dressed in protection against the cold, and in her arms, she holds Ava’s coat. It’s like a child’s favorite blanket, a soother, something which calms her to cling to. When she comes to the tidepools, Ava arrives as if on cue and smiles at her with the most beautiful, heart-stopping smile that makes Sarah’s heart skip a beat. Then she sees the coat and it disappears.

“Where did you get that?” she asks, crossing her arms, the water around her frothing as her tail undoubtedly lashes back and forth in the waves. 

“Olivia and Maggie had it,” she answers. “We were up on the dunes last night. Did you see the light?”

Ava’s eyes narrow and she looks like she’s about to say something, but then she comes closer to the shore, as close as she can get before her tail is no longer submerged. There’s a long set of scratches across her torso, from her right shoulder to her left hip. Ocean water washed the blood away, but they’re clearly deep, and they hadn’t been there yesterday. She inhales sharply, but that isn’t the point, she realizes as Ava reaches out and takes the coat from Sarah. In the blink of an eye, she wraps it around herself and it fits her perfectly, protects her from view but not disguising the shape of her body. It’s tighter on her than Sarah’s clothes are on her own body. The scratches are faintly visible through the tight mesh weaving.

“I know they do it to help,” Ava says quietly, her voice almost lost in the gurgling seafoam. “But the makos don’t like the smoke or the night light, and everyone knows it’s because of me.”

For a moment Sarah doesn’t get it, but then it turns her blood to ice. “They hurt you because we lit the candles out there.”

Although Ava doesn’t answer, there’s no confusion as to exactly what happened. And it hurts because Sarah only wanted her to feel loved, knows Maggie and Olivia and Noah want the same. She can’t forget the way it made her feel to be a part of that and to see the light, physically and metaphorically, shining out as a beacon to the world.

“Do they do that every year?”

“Since they started lighting it there,” Ava replies. “When they lit it down here, with me, no one saw and it was safe.”

Sarah doesn’t think before she speaks. “I can ask them to come here instead, so you won’t get hurt. And you can still come and enjoy it. They really miss you.”

“They replaced me,” Ava says with finality, and the conversation is over. 

At the very least, however, she stays and allows Sarah to come sit in the sand with her as the water strikes her back. Ava is cold like the weather, but it makes her chest feel warm to be held and to feel lips skimming over the crown of her head affectionately. She wants to be kissed, really kissed, like before, except she doesn’t have any clue how to ask. So she enjoys the affection she’s given and watches the sunlight reflect off the water and Ava’s beautiful scales, the coat floating in the water around them like jellyfish tentacles and glitter. 

The clouds, heavy, begin to open up above them and, in the first flurries of snow, Sarah stands up. She should go home, put on dry, warm clothes. Ava reaches for her, though, curls hands around the backs of her legs and kisses her stomach while looking up at her. 

“Maybe, if you do it down here, I’ll watch. No promises.”

Sarah bends down and kisses Ava’s forehead, and then she leaves, all too eager to tell Maggie and Olivia the good news. She shivers as she walks, as she lets herself in her front door and starts her shower with hot water so she may warm up before bothering to change into warm clothes. It’s early afternoon, although light is low with the lack of sun and the cloud of snow crushing the air. It’ll put out the candles, and the idea of Ava coming to see them and no one being there aches. 

She can’t get it out of her mind as she goes next door to shape the pretzels while Olivia braids dough and Maggie fries apples. She gets Noah’s coat (and gloves) for him. As they step outside, she says two things.

“We can’t light it on the dunes,” she says first. Second, she asks, “How do we protect the candles from the snow?”

“I’ve got an umbrella,” Maggie says. 

“Why not?” Olivia asks, her voice thick with frustration.

Sarah looks toward the beach, a shorter walk than their hike last night. “When you light it up there, the pod can see and they don’t like it, so they hurt Ava. She asked us to do it down at the tidepools, like you used to. And she said no promises, but she might join us.”

Olivia and Maggie share a look rife with pain and a million memories Sarah isn’t a part of. They come to some conclusion between them, and suddenly all the things they’re holding are on the ground, and Sarah is crushed between them, their arms around her and she’s suffocating, almost, but it doesn’t hurt. She can hear Olivia crying, feel Noah tugging her pant leg for attention, smell the cinnamon on Maggie’s skin. They’re family.

“Let’s go down there, then,” Olivia says, and instead of going to the car, they set towards the tapering cliff Sarah navigates most mornings. Usually she goes by feel, barefoot, but in her warm boots she finds herself sliding more than usual. Noah sits down and works his way slowly by scooting on his butt, Maggie moves with patience and care, and Olivia slips twice but thankfully doesn’t get hurt in her rush to reach the bottom. She gets there first, accompanied by the umbrella Maggie simply dropped to the bottom, and spreads the blanket before sheltering it from the wind and snow with care. By the time the rest of them get there, it’s a sheltered place to sit and Maggie lays out the menorah carefully, reaching for more candles. Two go in this time, and then the lighting candle, which she palms as they stare out at the darkening horizon. Sarah feels strange, just sitting here, and goes to the shallow lappings at the edge of the tide, searching for Ava.

“We came here for you,” she calls, her voice sweeping away with the wind. “You can come out, Ava. We made fried apples, and Olivia said they were your favorite…”

Nothing comes back to her from the waves. No faces rise from the water. She doesn’t want to cry but she thinks she might, and her hand comes up to her forearm and she tries to dig in her nails but can’t through her thick coat. She’d take it off if she could right now.

“Ava, please?”

After a minute of silence, Olivia comes and guides her to sit back down. There’s disappointment on her face, but also resignation, like she expected this anyways. She offers Sarah a smile, and takes her hand to squeeze in reassurance. Her voice shakes slightly as she recites the same blessing as last night. Then Maggie repeats about half of what she said last night as well, and strikes a match. She lights the extra candle and helps Noah move to light the other two, starting at the one towards the center. Then, once the lighting candle sits in the middle, Olivia starts pulling out the food. Sarah takes a fried apple and can’t bring herself to eat it because all she can think about is that Ava would want it.

Maggie seems about to say something, but then the waves make a loud sound and they all look to see Ava in the shallows, wrapped in her coat, watching them in silence, She seems startled to be noticed and turns to leave, but Sarah hurries to her and offers the slice of fried apple. Ava takes her arm by the wrist and steadies it, leaning forward and taking the end between her teeth before leaning away. She eats it slowly and her tail swishes under the water.

Then Olivia and Maggie are beside her, each holding another piece and it’s clear even in the low light that they’re teary eyed. They offer to her as well and Ava takes them and eats, and her face has turned soft and scrunched as well, although she may not be physically capable of crying.

“We’ve missed you so much,” Olivia says, kneeling in the surf with no regard and wrapping her arms around Ava. Maggie does as well. “We would never replace you. We love you so much, and we’re so, so, so thankful you’re here.”

Maggie keeps kissing the side of Ava’s head almost frantically, stroking her hair and just holding her like she’s a young child and not around Sarah’s age. They both cling to her and holds her and they look like this is the best moment of their lives. And Ava, she’s actually smiling so wide her face might split in half.

Sarah gives them a moment and goes back to Noah, who watches mindlessly as he eats a pretzel. He’s a fiend for them, and will eat the dough if given the chance. He reaches up to brush snow off Sarah’s hair and smiles at her, offers her a bite. She declines the slobbery pretzel, but takes another fried apple and lets it all but melt in her mouth as the three women cling to each other in the water. 

After a few minutes, they come closer and help Ava come further up the shore to nestle in against the edge of their blanket. She seems happy when she reaches for Sarah’s hand and laces their fingers together tightly, rests her wet hair against Sarah’s shoulder. They keep eating until everything is gone, and then Maggie gets their flat surface, Olivia opens the chocolate coins, and Noah produces the three dreidels from last night. Before Sarah can ask, Maggie digs into her backpack and produces two more dreidels- one blue and old and sand-weathered, the other plastic and brand new. 

“I brought Ava’s, just in case, and I got one for you, Sarah. I know it’s not super nice, but I thought you’d want one.”

Sarah accepts the shiny plastic and rubs her thumbs over the stickers on each side. It’s something small, but it makes her throat tighten and her nose burn again. She chokes out a thanks as Olivia gives her a handful of coins to play the game with.

She still needs guidance, but she understands better than last time and everyone just dissolves into eating the chocolates and laughing as the menorah burns facing the ocean, feeling the togetherness. Before long, Noah is falling asleep, and Ava’s breathing becomes labored enough that Sarah helps Olivia take her back to the water. They say their goodbyes and Ava promises to come back tomorrow.

When Sarah kisses her, she tastes like chocolate and fried apples and the ocean, and Sarah gets this image of a life spent just sunning on the rocks and swimming with Ava and never worrying about making it to therapy or the box still unpacked in her living room or the fact that she practically living with Maggie and Olivia anyways.

But it’s only a flash and then they’re making their way back up, Sarah taking supplies up so Olivia can carry the menorah and Maggie can carry Noah as they make their way back up the cliffside. 


	12. Chapter 12

The rest of Hanukkah passes much the same, save for Friday, when they all go to the dunes with a few other families- which fills Sarah with the stress of Ava being hurt- to eat and light the menorah and then some different candles she doesn’t understand. But come the final night of the holiday afterward, Ava was alright and said she understood and thought the lights were pretty, although she missed spending time with them.

As the snow still clings to things and falls in a crisp blanket, Sarah keeps going down to the ocean in spite of how cold it makes her every time. She shivers every day in the on and off snow, but comes down to the tidepools because Ava is there and always has a smile, often has a kiss. Winter blisters her cheeks as she arrives the day after Hanukkah ends, without Maggie or Olivia or Noah, and observes how rough the ocean has become with the weight of the storm. Ava is there, in the shallows with her coat. Sarah comes and joins her, although her bare feet feel frozen in the icy water made colder by a light dusting of snow, less oppressive than it’s been over the last week or so.

“Last night was the last night,” Ava says, not looking at Sarah directly. “I don’t want it to be.”

Sarah looks at her and she seems more lively than she had before. She’s always been a ray of light, something vibrant and real, but today her skin seems more golden and her eyes brighter and her cheeks pinker. She seems like she’s happier. And it could be because of her managing to reconnect to family instead of living in virtual isolation. She can’t talk to the pod, and she didn’t talk to other humans. Now it’s them, together, looking happier and with their hands laced together under the water.

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep seeing them,” Sarah replies.

But Ava shakes her head and doesn’t answer her. They stay in the shallows, taste salty air. Sarah watches Ava’s tail slowly move around in the water, restless, swept by the currents and the muscles which must be more powerful than they seem at first glance, and Sarah wants to reach out and touch. But she doesn’t. She waits for something else to be said, or for Ava to reach out and carry her in her arms to deeper waters where the fish swim and the sharks let their fins break the surface. She’s missed the deep. It felt more like a home than anything else she’s ever experienced. And being in the water again reminds her of that.

“Does the pod hurt you often?” she asks tactlessly.

Ava glances at her. “Only when they’re angry.”

“How often are they angry?”

She doesn’t get an answer for that, but it’s alright, she thinks. They’re together with the memories of last night, of the flames flickering in the wind and Ava teaching Sarah how to properly spin her dreidel so it goes around more than a couple times. There’s an art to it, she discovers, which Maggie and Ava have perfected but herself, Olivia and Noah still often struggle through. Like cooking, like painting, like breathing. She’ll learn over time, she thinks, just like she learned how to make dough with Olivia.

Over time. Over time means she would be staying here, even after she regains her sanity. Her therapy sessions are once a week now instead of twice, and she rarely calls her old one. She is doing better, really and truly, but that could mean it’s time for her to try for school again, and Sarah doesn’t entirely want to. She kind of wants to stay here with Ava and Olivia and Maggie and Noah and the way the ocean hits her face and the freedom she feels every time she breathes unpolluted air. It would be nice. She gets her monthly allowance which is more than enough for everything she needs, but she could always get a job in town if that changes. She doesn’t want to go.

“Olivia said she’ll bring dinner down here on friday night,” she offers. “We can all eat together.”

“I don’t need you to fix this,” Ava bites out.

She suddenly turns around and with a large splash of freezing water, she disappears, leaving Sarah sitting there with her toenails tinted purple under the foaming wash of the sea. Abandonment. Slowly, she stands up properly and wades back to where the water turns to snow and she can go back home to bundle up in warm clothes. Alone. Ava is upset with her, and there will be no sunset on the beach with fried apples and chocolate coins and family brought together, and Sarah gets this feeling that she may not be welcome to dinner tonight with Olivia and Maggie, although on some level she knows that she’s always welcome.

Dejected, she returns to her home and it feels too empty. She’s spent a good amount of her time during Hanukkah with a family, and now it feels too strange to be in a mirrored floor pattern, without any voices in the kitchen or warm lights in the living room or the smell of fresh baked bread wafting through the air. It would be easy to get back, she thinks, but not the same as it was before. It had felt like truly being a part of something. Doing the same things, but without the intention behind it that the holiday gave, it wouldn’t be special anymore and would simply feel like an imitation.

So she stays alone, staring at the boxes left in her living room. She’s been pulling clothes out of the boxes to wear, washing them every few days, and then putting them back in the box for the next time she goes fishing for clothes. And of course, there’s the box of her personal items, covered in a thickening layer of dust that cakes the cellophane tape sealing it. For most people, they would have been able to unpack so little within a week, if not a day. But she’s been here since the turn of the season and remains unable. Although she’s made progress, she is still broken. Being with family, being with Ava, being with the ocean has helped tame the memories, but still they linger. 

She glances around this house that isn’t a home and recognizes that she leaves the curtains open more often now. Too open. In a flurry she rushes to draw every single one closed, fingers digging into the sleeve of her puffy jacket between windows, her lungs shrinking with every passing second. She’s let her guard down, and for it, she’s been hurt by someone who’s supposed to love her all over again.  _ He _ had said he loved her. He loved her while she looked at the picture of his daughter and she cried and she wondered how bad it would be to just die then and there.

“No,” she whispers to herself. “No, Olivia and Maggie and Noah love me. And Ava’s my… my…” she chokes on the word and has to change it. “She’s my friend. They love me.”

Sarah wipes her cheeks of stray tears she doesn’t remember falling, and decides to go to her real home next door. In the fresh air she can easily smell something delicious cooking and sighs. Comfort food always helps.


	13. Chapter 13

Olivia is at work with Noah, but Maggie is home. She’s slowly stirring the pot on the stove and humming to herself when Sarah lets herself in, and turns around unstartled with a smile at the sound of the unlocked door creaking open on its unoiled hinges. Sarah’s been meaning to buy WD-40 for them- it’s the least she can do after everything they’ve done for her.

“The missus and Noah will be back soon,” Maggie says, “hopefully while the food is still hot.”

For some reason, Sarah can’t come up with a verbal response, so she just nods and takes a seat at the counter. Remnants of flour from hours of baking still powder the surface, meaning it hasn’t been wiped down since they finished baking yesterday. She should clean it up so that she’s doing  _ something _ , but instead she drags her fingers through the mess tiredly and watches Maggie cook. Maggie’s less talkative than Olivia, but warm and loving nonetheless. She wishes she knew what to say or do, how to explain to them that Ava doesn’t intend to keep seeing them now that the holiday is over and the warmth feels gone from the air. 

She’s still making patterns in the flour when Olivia and Noah come in the front door, talking about wherever they were. Sarah doesn’t listen. Her mind has managed to trap itself in the events of early morning. When Olivia inevitably touches her shoulder as a means of getting her attention, she flinches, her breath catching and her muscles tensing. She’s been trying to stop doing that. 

“Everything okay?”

Truly, she doesn’t mean to say anything. But the words just come.

“Ava doesn’t want to keep seeing us. You. Us. I don’t know.”

The response Olivia gives is the one she expected the least; solid arms wrap around her, with a hand coming to cup the back of her head, and she’s being held like someone worth caring about as opposed to being chastised or held accountable for something that isn’t her fault, or at least not on the whole. Sarah relaxes easily into the embrace, stays for as long as Olivia holds her and fills her lungs properly when she’s released.

“Hopefully she’ll come around.”

Sarah watches the family orbit around one another. Noah pulls at Maggie’s shirt until she picks him up to balance on her hip, and Olivia comes up behind her to kiss her temple and take a turn at stirring dinner on the stove. Always so familiar with each other, and while Sarah has started to feel as though she fits into it all, she realizes in this moment that she doesn’t in the way they each fit into each other. 

Maybe that’s how Ava feels, and why she doesn’t want to be around them.

Nonetheless, Sarah forces herself to her feet and goes to the fridge to cut fruit to round out the meal. An apple, maybe, to cut the warmth of the spaghetti sauce, but then she recalls what they’ve been eating for the past eight days and moves onto a couple oranges. Easy, simple, doable. She gets the good knife from the block to slice them up and arrange them on the plates Olivia has just begun to set out. There’s bread, too, and a portion of roasted vegetables that must’ve come from the oven. A colorful plate. 

As she throws away the peels and the center clumps of pulp, Sarah absentmindedly scratches at her wrist. The grounding sensation prickles through her body, slow and steady, forcing her into reality and out of her mind, which has tangled itself into a mess of confusion and hurt and memory.

“Do you worry about Ava?” she asks. “When you don’t get to see her?”

Maggie’s arm around Noah twitches. “Of course. But we can’t force it. She needs her time, if the last few years are any indication.”

It makes sense. But it hurts. And Sarah doesn’t say anything else while they all eat dinner, just eats slowly and pretends she fits in the way she felt she did during Hanukkah. Things are different away from the beach and the lights, and without Ava to round things out. So once she eats and helps wash the dishes, she just goes back home and lays across the couch with her arm thrown over her eyes. She’s still thinking about Ava. About her sudden hostility and isolation and the knowledge that, for some reason or another, the local mako pod won’t stop hurting her. It hurts her. And she wishes, more than anything that there was something she could do.

She wishes she could sink into sleep as opposed to laying here and agonizing, but her mind won’t allow it. She keeps seeing the gashes and scars that dot along Ava’s body. Marks of being hurt by the world outside of her, so opposite to the pain Sarah has been causing herself for so long without meaning to. The scratches on her arm are from her own hand. It’s the same but also different. Sarah catches herself adding to the pain now and forces her hand down. She’s been doing better lately, enough that she’s stopped with the protective bandaging, but suddenly it feels like she’s back to the place she started when she first arrived at this house. Recovery feels out of reach again.

All she wants to do is go to the beach and swim with Ava. Feel the water, lose herself in the spray of salt. It made her feel more alive. And the only time she’s ever ventured out on her own, she nearly drowned. It wasn’t as fun by herself anyways.

Sarah knows she should stay in for once, especially given Ava’s cold dismissal, but she can’t help herself. Before she knows it, she’s going down to the tide pools in spite of the cold, wading into the icy waves and staring out at a long horizon in hopes of being found and given the opportunity to lose herself to the ocean without fear. Deep down, she knows she’s still searching for Ava. A flash of her tail, a glimpse of her coat, anything to indicate that she hasn’t given up on Sarah the way she gave up on her family.

“Ava,” she begs the churning water. “Ava, please?”

Fins break surface, only for a moment, and then disappear. But they do not belong to Ava. Instead, they’re grey and stiff, more for cutting through the waves than for agile control of motion. Sarah steps forward anyways because she feels alone and wants someone to hold her in the water. She waits, then, with foam at her ankles and the wind whipping her cheeks, until the fins slip down and then up come faces. Not tanned like Ava, but pale and sallow with hollowed cheekbones and eyes consumed by the pupils. They remind Sarah of something from a horror film, but she isn’t afraid because they come from the same place Ava does. At the same time, however, she has a dim awareness that they must be from the pod which hurts her.

“My name is Sarah,” she says softly. “What are your names?”

The three mermaids stare for a long moment. One of them, the woman with brunette locks and a square jaw, tilts her head to the side. The other two, both dark haired men who cling to each other, do not move. But they too watch her carefully. 

“Do you have names?”

The woman clucks her tongue, revealing rows of sharp teeth, and makes a series of sharpened clicking noises for a handful of seconds. It must be their real language, and Sarah wonders if maybe Ava has a real language beyond the English she must have picked up from Olivia and Maggie. 

“English?”

One of the men lunges forward, and Sarah hurries back up to the gritty sand and out of their reach. Unlike Ava, they don’t seem keen on the shallows, let alone sitting beyond where the waves can dig into the beach. They don’t say anything, but still they watch. Sarah remembers the very young one that bit her, and imagines the way adults like these could seriously hurt her. And could hurt Ava, worse than they already have.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- to upset you.”

They still don’t speak to her. But a large wave, a heavy one, rolls over, high enough to dance at the pads of her feet, covering the mermaids’ heads in its path. When the water recedes, they’re gone.

Alone once more, burning with embarrassment, Sarah settles into the sand and sits there to watch the ocean roll in and out, in and out, in and out. The tide rises and falls too, and still she sits, until the sun sets deep and a dusting of snow falls and her nose is cold enough to hurt. Still, she sits. She digs her nails into her forearm. She waits for Ava with a bittersweet hope.

Only when her chest hurts from how cold the air is does she force herself to her feet.


	14. Chapter 14

Waking up mid-morning scorches what’s left of her heart. Still alone, still herself, she leaves the sheets be and decides a walk into the city center will make her feel more alive, if only for a moment. While she’s there, she’ll get some breakfast. Maybe talk to people other than her neighbors or Ava. It’s the sort of thing her therapist would probably recommend. That’s what she thinks about as her feet carry her across pavement and to a little bakery whose morning crowd has waned by the time weekday hits further than the start of work for most. No line bars her way when she orders a croissant and a coffee, and no one crowds around her when she sits at a small table by herself. Solitude, of a different sort than she experiences at the beach, washes over her as she eats and wonders.

Her mind pulls her in a thousand different directions, fights for her attention at each corner in spite of how she can scarcely concentrate on one. The aggressive pod which seeks to cause nothing but harm. Ava and her injuries. Noah and his mothers who love him the way mothers are supposed to love. All things need her consideration, and instead of offering it, Sarah merely takes bites of her croissant until there’s nothing but crumbs dusting the paper bag it came in and a greasy film clinging to her fingertips. Then, with nothing left to do, she wonders around the shops properly for the first time since her initial exploration on the day she saw her local therapist for the very first time.

There aren’t really any chain stores. Everything is locally owned. There’s a couple clothing shops, a grocery store, and then mostly specialty wares that draw her eye. A glass craftsman, a candle maker, a seamstress, a woodcarver. People who’ve dedicated their lives to one skill, just one, and have perfected it in a way Sarah has never been able to perfect anything.

She wanders into the local book shop, a secondhand store which is rife with old oak shelves and books with cracked spines from being loved very much. For lack of something better to do, she looks through the maze of titles, organized by genre, and winds up in the nonfiction section. Fingertips trace hardcovers, glance embossed names, until she reaches a book which does not seem to have been officially published. Curiosity has her taking it from its place and flipping it open. Everything is hand written in swirling black ink, accompanied by sketches Sarah recognizes easily. Mermaids. Makos, more specifically with their stiff fins and sharp teeth and dark eyes. There are paragraphs upon paragraphs about them alongside bullet points and questions. It’s too much to read all at once right now, but it’s a book which might be worth buying. She flips it over and finds no price, but begins searching for the checkout counter just in case. She has so many questions that perhaps she’ll earn answers to.

When Sarah finally finds the counter, manned by a woman with grey-streaked curls and a resting smile on her face even before noticing Sarah there with a book tucked under one of her arms. She doesn’t say a word, but she does straighten up and gesture toward the book with a smile.

“I’d like to buy it,” Sarah says, setting it on the counter. “Please.”

The woman still doesn’t say anything, but points to the cash register and mocks a question mark with one of her fingertips. When Sarah hesitates, the woman points to her own ears and shakes her head. It strikes her, then. Deaf. She nods and pushes the book closer before grabbing her wallet and reaching for her plastic. 

After a moment of examination, the woman gives Sarah a sympathetic look and puts the book beneath her counter. She hits her two flat palms against each other in an x and then points at the register. Not for sale. Frustrated, Sarah has no choice but to nod and find her way out. She should have taken a closer look at what was in there before trying to buy it, since she was unsure whether or not it was for sale in the first place. Too late now, though, and she finds her way out of the store in favor of continuing to explore downtown. There’s a jewelry store she goes into which specializes in that which comes from the sea. Shells polished into beads and pearls strung together hang in the window alongside blown up photographs of diamond inlays. Truly, it is a store designed for pretty things. Sarah doesn’t know why she goes inside, but feels she has no choice otherwise. 

There seems to be no one at the front counter, but everything is behind locked glass cases. Some rings, some necklaces. Shells and diamonds and rubies and shark teeth. Everything is so pretty, and Sarah has to make a conscious effort not to put her fingers on the glass and leave behind prints.

Everything is beautiful, but her eyes land on a particular necklace in a case of its own, elevated with a plaque beneath it. The chain is gold, mostly polished, and beaded with mussel shells like Ava gave her and small teeth like the makos have. It almost unsettles her, but it’s so pretty. Her eyes wander down to the plaque.

_ In 1945, the Rhodes family extended this necklace as a peace offering for the local mermaid pod. However, it was rejected by the increasingly isolationist pod, found among the tidepools. Shortly thereafter, a body washed up on the shore. Her teeth were added to the necklace and it has been preserved as a peace offering on hold ever since. Since this initial offering, any contact with the mermaids have been isolated incidents. In more recent years, mermaids have been seen watching local environmental teams and playing in the water. _

“I don’t recognize you, are you new in town?”

The voice startles her and Sarah looks around for the source, finding it in a petite woman with a sleek bob standing by one of the other counter. Something about her face is familiar, but she can’t put her finger on it as she steps away from the display.

“I am, I’ve uh-” she clears her throat, “I’ve been here a few months. I’m Sarah. Reese.”

“Claire Rhodes.”

Sarah nods thoughtfully. “Your family made this?”

“My grandfather,” Claire corrects. Sarah studies the shape of her nose. “He had an affair with one of the maids, and made this to try and appease them after. But it didn’t work. The maid he slept with, she- he found her dead not long after. My grandmother took her teeth out and added them.”

That’s awful. But Sarah doesn’t say so, and instead looks back at the necklace carefully, The beautiful peace offering which now has bloodshed on teeth from a carcass. It makes Sarah think, for some reason, about the office and the photos and the way she bled a little onto the carpet. 

“Did you want to buy anything?”

“No, but thank you.”

Still, she thinks about the necklace as she leaves and goes back home. The makos didn’t used to be so angry, it seems. Maybe it was a byproduct of one of them procreating with a human. Then, suddenly, it hits her why Claire Rhodes’ face looked familiar. She has the same nose, the same jaw as one of the mermaids she saw yesterday. One of the men. And he reminds her of the little one who bit her too.

She thinks about it the whole way home, and then down to the water again, and as she rejoins the waning tidepools. Water rushes, and Sarah stares into the foam until she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. Hope bubbles up and, in answer, she sees a flash of blonde hair and then it’s Ava, watching her as she rises from the waves. 

“Ava,” Sarah starts, and doesn’t finish.

She doesn’t finish because Ava comes close and pulls her even closer to kiss her, kiss her like she did in the beginning and Sarah is finally given the opportunity to lose herself in it. Eyes shut, hands falling to Ava’s waist before skin turns to scales. Her hands fit neat, and for a long moment, she buries herself in the feeling. But too soon, Ava pulls back and Sarah can’t help following her for a split second.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “For interfering with Liv and Maggie.”

Ava shakes her head and smiles, and she’s just so beautiful it hurts. “No, I’m glad you did. Thank you. I just reacted because of the pod. They’re angry.”

“Because of us?”

Although the answer comes hesitantly, it still comes and rings in the air. Yes, it’s because of them. Because they lit their candles on the top of the dunes, because they wanted to bring even a little light to someone who they all love, if not the same way.

Sarah realizes, then, that she truly does love Ava. She loves her, and if possible, would bring her entire life into the ocean just to see her all the time, even more than she already does because she can’t stay away.

“Can we go swimming today?”

Eyes cast down. Fingertips twitch against her face. “We can’t. They’re angry.”

Angry, and yet Ava is still here instead of the sheltered hollow in the cliffside Sarah saw when she was new, and she kisses her again like Sarah is her oxygen. The opposite is, at the very least, unbearably true. Nowhere does Sarah feel more alive and more like a human being than when she sits here with the water eating away at the warmth in her body. There she resides as she is kissed like a dying woman, and as Ava makes her whole.

For these handfuls of moments, she feels safe and secure in Ava’s grasp and the taste of her lips. The ocean breathes life into her, and Sarah takes the chance to keep touching the way she’s considered once or twice. Touching a body that is like her own but different. Not just in imagination, but in reality. Sarah finds it easy to drown in. And then Ava kisses her neck too, and allows hands under her jacket and it just feels like being wanted. Not like her teacher wanted her. No, this feels like being wanted as a person and not an object and she is in love and is loved. And it tastes like freedom.

“Ava,” she breathes, and it warms the air around them.

“Ava,” and the wind blows harder.

“Ava,” and the waves crash louder.

“Ava,” and the sun shines brighter.

“Ava,” and Sarah is alive again.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay fewwas its finally over...

As the sun travels over the sea, Sarah and Ava share countless kisses and learn each other’s bodies, but as it begins to set, Sarah knows she must go home, and as such, Ava must return to her own along the far cliffside. She hikes back up, soaked in seawater, and gets into dry clothes before sitting on the cold floor in front of the last box. Still cellophane-taped together, coated in a thick layer of dust, sitting off to the side in a way which has allowed her to abandon it for far too long. She gets the sense that opening it would be a step forward, one she isn’t sure she’s prepared for. As much as she has grown and healed, it still feels unattainable. Overwhelming.

Nonetheless, she shoves her key into the gap where two cardboard flaps meet and begins to slice through the tape. Little by little, she breaks into her memory until the box falls open and she’s left staring into bubble wrap. She didn’t pack this box. She didn’t pack any of them. Everything she brought with her was carefully folded away by someone else’s hands, and as such, she isn’t sure which mementos have come with her. They could very well be reminders of what happened to her. Or they could be comforts from a home she has since overwritten with the family she’s built here.

Beneath the cushion, the first thing she lays eyes on is her graduation cap from when she did her pre-med. Sentimental, cheesy, but her own. She had been happy and excited to become a doctor and save lives before everything. Then her hands are of their own mind as she looks to see what else. Books she’s cherished. Spirals of dutiful notes from class. A trophy for winning an essay competition in grade school. Memories flood in, more bad than good, and she welcomes them with an ease she never thought she could feel about the past again. Her mind doesn’t stray to photographs on desks or coats that smell like mothballs. Instead, she takes a moment to be proud of herself for how far she got before everything. It means something, that survival. And even if she’s had to come away from it, it’s the sort of destiny that Maggie has mentioned over early morning breakfast, and the sort of good chance that Olivia mentions in prayer when she holds Sarah’s hand on rough afternoons. 

She should have done this sooner, she thinks to herself as she carries knick-knacks to the kitchen to arrange on the counters void of coffee makers or fruit bowls. All this time and still, she doesn’t cook for herself because she always eats with Olivia and Maggie, and they always welcome her into their home with open arms and a sense of being loved unconditionally. It’s warm like a matronly embrace as she arranges photos and books on marble, and feels like this space belongs to her in a way it didn’t before. Everything fits neatly among the shells Ava gave her so long ago as well. 

On the path to something worth living in, she even goes so far as to give her hair a complete run through with the brush, even if it winds up a little frizzy because she hasn’t felt like investing in a comb, and scrapes it into a ponytail before heading to Olivia and Maggie. Golden light beams onto the lawn through the open drapes, and when she reaches the front porch she can hear Noah shrieking in delight. When Sarah opens the door, it’s to Maggie teaching him how to knead dough on a plastic sheet on the living room floor as Olivia cuts cooked and seasoned chicken breast to place onto already mostly loaded plates. Although Sarah has just now shown up, there are three plates and Noah’s high chair set out and filled. She is wanted.

“Anything I can do to help?” she asks.

Olivia shakes her head, and gives her an endeared look. “You look happy.”

“I saw Ava today,” Sarah admits. “She’s having a rough time, but she does miss you all. And she does want to keep eating dinner together, if you’ll have her.”

And of course they will, which Olivia doesn’t hesitate to say, and she seems overjoyed again as they eat, as does Maggie. It feels like a celebration, almost, and yet Sarah still can’t let go of the necklace she saw in town which told of a fraught history. A creature as human and as ethereal as a mermaid passed, and the solution of the jewelers was to take her teeth and add them to a necklace which was supposed to symbolize peace. It’s inhumane. It lingers in the back of her mind in spite of the happy atmosphere and how she had felt unpacking her box of mementos, unwilling to be banished in order to save her an instance of joy she so desperately needs in a world such as this one.

After dinner, Sarah does the dishes. She thanks Olivia and Maggie for the meal. She hugs them goodbye, kisses the top of Noah’s head. She rolls up her pant legs and strips her feet bare. And again, she returns to the water and waits for Ava to come so she can touch her again and learn more of the contours of her body and the taste of her sighs and the life of each twitching sinuous muscle from a woman carved out of all the best things in the ocean.

Moonlight, obscured by clouds, does not approach her but she sees her way well enough with leftover street lamps and the way her body recognizes the contours of the tidepools. She sits, happy, and touches anemones with her icy fingertips while water flows past and warns her of an incoming high tide. Her own breath crystallizes in front of her.

She waits. 

Waiting and alive, she keeps her eyes open until finally, finally, Ava rises and wraps slippery arms around her. Close. Sarah kisses her twice, and Ava swims her out of the shallows and to where fish weave in the currents and the makos like to take precedent. She’s nervous but refuses to voice it when she has such potential for a good night and she’s preoccupied with dreams of more dinners with Ava on the beach and the euphoria of physical connection with someone who really does love her completely. The water swims around them and, as the chill of the air bites Sarah’s face, grey sharp fins begin to cut through the surface once more. Ava sees them, but doesn’t tense like Sarah does.

Ava makes a series of clicks and sounds like the makos use to communicate with each other. Sarah wonders if it’s the same language or if Ava just learned. Heads break waves, the same three who she’s already met, the young one, and a handful of others who stay back.

“Are they going to hurt us?” she whispers.

The woman trills back at Ava, who smiles in relief. “Not tonight. They came to talk to you.”

“I don’t-”

“Little English,” the woman says. Her teeth catch the limited light and Ava holds Sarah just the smallest bit tighter. “You’re nice to us. Not like others.”

“Why would I be mean?”

One of the men, the one who looks like the jeweler’s granddaughter, tilts his head to the side. “They hurt my mother,” he explains. “Her…” He waves a scaly arm in front of his face. His mother’s teeth.

“I’m not like that. Most of us, we’re not like that.”

Ava nods beside her and Sarah can feel the brush of her lips against her temple. Tenderness, safety. A reminder she is not out here alone and in an emergency, she will have the chance to get safely back to the beach and up to her home. She shivers a little. It’s cold out here.

“How can I help you with that?” she asks. “To trust us again?”

“His mother’s body,” the woman answers, gesturing toward the man who spoke. “We want to properly send her off.”

“Is her body somewhere up there? Or just her teeth?”

The man points to his mouth again. Just her teeth. Sarah pictures the necklace in her mind and knows, it may not be easy to get, but it’s the right thing to do. And maybe Claire will understand that. Hopefully, she will understand that. If not, Sarah can just pull out her mother’s card and name prices until it’s high enough. Not only is it right, but it could help protect Ava from the times these mermaids have taken out their anger on her, the one who keeps bringing humans and food and light down to the shore where it’s impossible to ignore.

But it seems they’re just scared. Grieving and in pain, wishing for a proper send-off for a loved one. It’s a human thing to feel and want, and so Sarah makes a promise to bring everything back, and they all melt back into the darkness, leaving Sarah with her legs around Ava’s waist and a question of exactly how long these people have been hurting without being able to ask anyone for help.

She wants to just enjoy this moment, but it has been tainted. Sarah’s just tired and in need of rest, after the emotional toll of this and unpacking her mementos, as well as having been able to touch Ava and understand her love as something which is attraction as much as it is affection. And that’s okay, she decides as she skims her palms along the sculpted muscle of Ava’s back and shoulders. She’s allowed. She’s loved.

They continue to drift, until Sarah eventually falls asleep cradled in Ava’s arms, and wakes up on the shore, out of low tide’s reach, with Ava’s coat wrapped around her body.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @princessbekker (formerly @beelivia)


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